[ [261] {217}[Compare—
"We loved, Sir, used to meet:
How sad, and bad, and mad it was!
But then how it was sweet!"
Confessions, by Robert Browning.]
[ [262] {220}[Compare—
"In sleep I heard the northern gleams; ...
In rustling conflict through the skies,
I heard, I saw the flashes drive."
The Complaint, stanza i. lines 3, 5, 6.
See, too, reference to Hearne's Journey from Hudson's Bay, etc., in prefatory note, Works of W. Wordsworth, 1889, p. 86.]
[ [263] [As Dr. Englaender points out (Mazeppa, 1897, p. 73), it is probable that Byron derived his general conception of the scenery of the Ukraine from passages in Voltaire's Charles XII., e.g.: "Depuis Grodno jusqu'au Borysthene, en tirant vers l'orient ce sont des marais, des déserts, des forêts immenses" (Oeuvres, 1829, xxiv. 170). The exquisite beauty of the virgin steppes, the long rich grass, the wild-flowers, the "diviner air," to which the Viscount de Vogüé testifies so eloquently in his Mazeppa, were not in the "mind's eye" of the poet or the historian.]
[ [bu] {222}
And stains it with a lifeless red.—[MS.]
Which clings to it like stiffened gore.—[MS. erased.]