Byron's first genuine love-affair occurred when he was sixteen. The object of this affection, as all the world knows, was Miss Chaworth, whose estate adjoined Newstead. The lady was two years older than Byron, and being of a lively nature found a pleasant diversion in leading the youth a merry chase. So severe was his attack that he was alternately oppressed by chills of fear and fevers of ecstasy. He lost appetite, and the family began to fear for his sanity. Such a love must find expression some way, and so the daily stealthy notes to the young woman took the form of rhyme. The lovesick youth was revealing considerable facility in this way. It pleased him, and did the buxom young woman no harm.
Beyond the mere prettiness and pinky whiteness of a healthy country lass, Miss Chaworth evidently had no beauties of character, save those conjured forth from the inner consciousness of the poet—a not wholly original condition.
Byron loved the Ideal. And this love-affair with Miss Chaworth is only valuable as showing the evolution of imagination in the poet. The woman hadn't the slightest idea that she was giving wings to a soul—to her the affair was simply funny.
The fact that Byron's great-uncle, from whom he had inherited his title, had killed the grandfather of Miss Chaworth in a duel, lent a romantic tinge to the matter—the boy was doing a sort of penance, and in one of his poems hints at the undoing of the sin of his kinsman by the lifelong devotion that he will bestow. This calling up the past, and incautious revealing of the fact that the ancestor Chaworth could not hold his own with a Byron, but allowed himself to be run through the body by the Byron cold steel, was not pleasing to Miss Chaworth.
"Don't imagine I am such a fool as to love that lame boy," cried Miss Chaworth to her maid one day.
Unluckily, "the lame boy" was in the next room and heard the remark.
He rushed from the house with a something gripping at his heart. Straightway he would go back to Harrow, which he had left in wrath only a few months before.
So he went to Harrow.
When he next returned home, his mother met him with the remark, "I have news for you; get out your handkerchief—Miss Chaworth is married."
In just another year Byron was home again, and was invited to dine with the Chaworths. He accepted the invitation, and when he was introduced to a baby girl, a month old, the child of his old sweetheart, his emotions got the better of him and he had to leave the room. And to ease his woe he indited a poem to the baby.