[DF] {179}
Are not these pretty stanzas?—some folks say—
Downright in print—.—[MS.]
[222] [Compare Coleridge's Lines to Nature, which were published in the Morning Herald, in 1815, but must have been unknown to Byron—
"So will I build my altar in the fields,
And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be.">[
[223] ["As early as the fifth or sixth century of the Christian era, the port of Augustus was converted into pleasant orchards, and a lovely grove of pines covered the ground where the Roman fleet once rode at anchor.... This advantageous situation was fortified by art and labour, and in the twentieth year of his age, the Emperor of the West ... retired to ... the walls and morasses of Ravenna."—Gibbon's Decline and Fall, 1825, ii. 244, 245.]
[224] ["The first time I had a conversation with Lord Byron on the subject of religion was at Ravenna, my native country, in 1820, while we were riding on horseback in an extensive solitary wood of pines. The scene invited to religious meditation. It was a fine day in spring. 'How,' he said, 'raising our eyes to heaven, or directing them to the earth, can we doubt of the existence of God?—or how, turning them to what is within us, can we doubt that there is something more noble and durable than the clay of which we are formed?'"—Count Gamba.]
[225] {180}[If the Pineta of Ravenna, bois funèbre, invited Byron "to religious meditation," the mental picture of the "spectre huntsman" pursuing his eternal vengeance on "the inexorable dame"—"that fatal she," who had mocked his woes—must have set in motion another train of thought. Such lines as these would "speak comfortably" to him—
"Because she deem'd I well deserved to die,