[48] {38}[Compare—
"Then Cythna turned to me and from her eyes
Which swam with unshed tears," etc.
Shelley's Revolt of Islam ("Laon and Cythna"),
Canto XII. stanza xxii. lines 2, 3, Poetical Works, 1829, p. 48.]
[49] [An old servant of the Chaworth family, Mary Marsden, told Washington Irving (Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey, 1835, p. 204) that Byron used to call Mary Chaworth "his bright morning star of Annesley." Compare the well-known lines—
"She was a form of Life and Light,
That, seen, became a part of sight;
And rose, where'er I turned mine eye,
The Morning-star of Memory!"
The Giaour, lines 1127-1130, Poetical Works, 1900, iii. 136, 137.]
[50] ["This touching picture agrees closely, in many of its circumstances, with Lord Byron's own prose account of the wedding in his Memoranda; in which he describes himself as waking, on the morning of his marriage, with the most melancholy reflections, on seeing his wedding-suit spread out before him. In the same mood, he wandered about the grounds alone, till he was summoned for the ceremony, and joined, for the first time on that day, his bride and her family. He knelt down—he repeated the words after the clergyman; but a mist was before his eyes—his thoughts were elsewhere: and he was but awakened by the congratulations of the bystanders to find that he was—married."—Life, p. 272.
Medwin, too, makes Byron say (Conversations, etc., 1824, p. 46) that he "trembled like a leaf, made the wrong responses, and after the ceremony called her (the bride) Miss Milbanke." All that can be said of Moore's recollection of the "memoranda," or Medwin's repetition of so-called conversations (reprinted almost verbatim in Life, Writings, Opinions, etc., 1825, ii. 227, seq., as "Recollections of the Lately Destroyed Manuscript," etc.), is that they tend to show that Byron meant The Dream to be taken literally as a record of actual events. He would not have forgotten by July, 1816, circumstances of great import which had taken place in December, 1815: and he's either lying of malice prepense or telling "an ower true tale.">[
[j] {40}
——the glance
Of melancholy is a fearful gift;
For it becomes the telescope of truth,
And shows us all things naked as they are.—[MS.]