And Colonel Stanhope, afterward Lord Harrington, who only knew Lord Byron later at Missolonghi, also says: "I have often observed Lord Byron in the middle of some gay animated conversation, stop, meditate, and his eyes to fill with tears."
And all that he did in that fatal Greece, was it not a perpetual triumph over himself, his tastes, his desires, the wants of his nature and his heart?
He saw nothing in Greece, he wrote to Mme. G——, that did not make him wish to return to Italy, and yet he remained in Greece. He would have preferred waiting in the Ionian Islands, and yet he set out for that fatal Missolonghi! Liberal by principle, and aristocratic by birth, taste, and habits, he was condemned to continual intercourse with vulgar, turbulent, barbarous men, to come into contact with things repugnant to his nature and his tastes, and to struggle against a thousand difficulties—a thousand torments, moral and physical; he felt, and knew, that even life would fail him if he did not leave Missolonghi, yet he remained. Every thing, in short, throughout this last stage of the noble pilgrim, proclaims his empire over self. His triumph was always beautiful, and often sublime, but, alas! he paid for it with his life.
FOOTNOTES:
[77] Parry, 206.
[78] Essay by Colonel Stanhope.
[79] "Last Journey to Greece," p. 174.
[80] Moore, "Letters," p. 241.
[81] "Childe Harold."