"If to be able," says Moore, "to depict powerfully the painful emotions it is necessary first to have experienced them, or, in other words, if, for the poet to be great the man must suffer, Lord Byron, it must be owned, paid early this dear price of mastery."
This was certainly a most painful crisis in his existence. What he felt then can not be called melancholy; it was truly desolation, agony of heart. Seeing himself alone in his venerable but gloomy abode, beside the dead body of his mother, solitude was for the first time intolerable to him, and, despite his strength of mind, he experienced moments of weakness. In his agony he wrote a letter to his friend Scroope Davies that is truly painful to read, so much does it bear the impress of intense suffering.
"Some curse hangs over me and mine," says he. "My mother lies a corpse in this house; one of my best friends is drowned in a ditch. What can I say, or think, or do?
"My dear Davies, if you can spare a moment, do come down to me; I want a friend. Come to me, Scroope, I am almost desolate, left almost alone in the world. I must enjoy the survivors while I can. Write or come, but come if you can, or one or both."
Hardly had he allowed himself this heartrending expression of grief, most touching for those who knew his repugnance to showing any sensibility of heart, when a new calamity overtook him. His dear friend, Wingfield, died at Coimbra at the age of twenty-one. Thoughts of death even took possession of Lord Byron's soul, influencing and directing all his actions. Neither self-love, nor the hope of great success with "Childe Harold," which had been announced to him as he passed through London, any longer could charm; tears dimmed the lustre of fame; he could only occupy himself with the fate of the surviving, and resolved on making his will in case of his own death. We find him then at this time solely engaged in making out this new deed. He destroyed the old will, rendered useless by the death of his mother, and took care to forget no one in the new one; all his servants were mentioned with admirable solicitude; and, in short, his last testament fully displayed the beautiful, generous soul that had dictated it.
Some weeks after, he wrote to Dallas:—
"At three-and-twenty I am left alone, and what more can we be at seventy? It is true that I am young to begin again, but with whom can I retrace the laughing part of life?"
"Indeed," writes he at the same time to Hodgson, "the blows followed each other so rapidly, that I am yet stupid from the shock; and though I do eat, and drink, and talk, and even laugh at times, yet I can hardly persuade myself that I am awake did not every morning convince me mournfully to the contrary.
"Davies has been here; his gayety (death can not mar it) has done me service; but, after all, ours was a hollow laughter! You will write to me? I am solitary, and I never felt solitude irksome before."
His moral sufferings had never been so great; and what he said and experienced under these circumstances, amply prove that solitude was good for him, when not unhappy. "I can do nothing," writes he to Dallas, "and my days pass, except for a few bodily exercises, in uniform indolence and idle insipidity."