“Deigning to varnish scenes that shun the day
With guilty lustre and with amorous lay.”
But Byron kept Mary’s lock of hair, and showed it, together with her portrait, to his friends and wrote:
“Thro’ hours, thro’ years, thro’ time ’twill cheer—
My hope in gloomy moments raise;
In life’s last conflict ’twill appear,
And meet my fond, expiring gaze.”
To Mary Chaworth herself Byron could hardly have said more, but he was, in fact, at this time, saying the same sort of thing to all and sundry. Just the same sentiment recurs in the lines addressed “To a lady who presented the author with the velvet band which bound her tresses”:
“Oh! I will wear it next my heart;
’Twill bind my soul in bonds to thee:
From me again ’twill ne’er depart,
But mingle in the grave with me.”
Yet if Byron proposes to be faithful for ever to this un-named lady, he proposes, at the same time, to be equally faithful to a lady who can be identified as Miss Anne Houson:
“With beauty like yours, oh, how vain the contention!
Thus lowly I sue for forgiveness before you;—
At once to conclude such a fruitless dissension,
Be false, my sweet Anne, when I cease to adore you!”
And then there are other lines—innumerable other lines which would also have to be quoted if the treatment of the subject were to be encyclopædic—lines to Marion, lines to Caroline, lines to a beautiful Quaker, lines to Miss Julia Leacroft, whose brother, the fire-eating Captain John Leacroft remonstrated with Byron, and, according to Moore, even went so far as to challenge him, on account of his pointed attentions to his sister: lines, finally, to M.S.G. who would appear, if verse could be accepted as autobiography, to have offered to yield to Byron, but to have been spared because of his tender regard for her fair fame:
“I will not ease my tortured heart,
By driving dove-ey’d peace from thine;
Rather than such a sting impart,
Each thought presumptuous I resign.
“At least from guilt shalt thou be free,
No matron shall thy shame reprove;
Though cureless pangs may prey on me,
No martyr shalt thou be to love.”
With that citation we may quit the subject. Not one of the sets of verses—with the single exception of the set addressed to Miss Leacroft—has any discoverable story attached to it. All of them—or nearly all of them—have the air of celebrating some profound attachment from which no escape is to be looked for on this side of the grave. Byron’s later conception of himself as a man who had loved but one had not crept into his poetry yet. He had not even begun to strike the pose of the Childe impelled to “visit scorching climes beyond the sea” because the one he loved “could ne’er be his.”