That was written on September 9; and it approximated to the truth. Having despatched his report, Hobhouse took Byron for the tour already referred to—over the Col de Jaman, down the Simmenthal to Thun, up the Lake of Thun to Interlaken, and thence to Lauterbrunnen, Grindelwald, Brienz, and back by way of Berne, Fribourg, and Yverdon. Byron kept a journal of the journey for his sister to peruse. In the main it is merely a record, admirably written, of things seen; but now and again the diarist speaks out and shows how exactly his companion had read and interpreted his mind.
“It would be a great injustice,” Hobhouse had continued to Mrs. Leigh, in reference to the “calamity” and the “charge,” “to suppose that he has dismissed the subject from his thoughts, or indeed from his conversation, upon any other motive than that which the most bitter of his enemies would commend. The uniformly guarded and tranquil manner shows the effort which it is meant to hide.” And there are just two passages in the Diary in which we see the tranquil manner breaking down. In the first place at Grindelwald:
“Starlight, beautiful, but a devil of a path. Never mind, got safe in; a little lightning; but the whole of the day as fine in point of weather as the day on which Paradise was made. Passed whole woods of withered pines, all withered; trunks stripped and barkless, branches lifeless; done by a single winter—their appearance reminded me of me and my family.”
In the second place, at the very end of the tour:
“I ... have seen some of the noblest views in the world. But in all this—the recollections of bitterness, and more especially of recent and more home desolation, which must accompany me through life, have preyed upon me here; and neither the music of the Shepherd, the crashing of the Avalanche, nor the torrent, the mountain, the Glacier, the Forest, nor the Cloud, have for one moment lightened the weight upon my heart, nor enabled me to lose my old wretched identity in the majesty, and the power and the glory, around, above, and beneath me.”
A striking admission truly of the unreality and insincerity of the Byronic presentation of Wordsworth’s Pantheism, and concluding with an exclamation which shows clearly how distinct a thing Byron’s individuality was to him, and how far he was from picturing himself, in sober prose, as “a portion of the tempest” or anything but his passionate and suffering self:
“I am past reproaches; and there is a time for all things. I am past the wish of vengeance, and I know of none like for what I have suffered; but the hour will come when what I feel must be felt, and the—but enough.”
And so up the Rhone valley and over the Simplon to Italy, where his life was to enter upon yet another phase.