Three years had passed since he had seen her. Her mind had been temporarily deranged by her troubles, but she had recovered. She had been reconciled to her husband, and was living with him at Colwick Hall, near Nottingham. Close to the walls of that old mansion flows the river Trent; and Byron wrote the lines beginning:
“River that rollest by the ancient walls,
Where dwells the Lady of my love, when she
Walks by thy brink, and there perchance recalls
A faint and fleeting memory of me.”
The common supposition is that the river invoked is the Po, and that the lady referred to is Madame Guiccioli; but that can hardly be. Seeing that Madame Guiccioli was, at this time, beseeching Byron to come to her arms at Ravenna, her recollection of him could hardly be described as “fair and fleeting.” The allusion is evidently to an anterior passion; and Madame Guiccioli’s place in the poem comes in a later stanza:
“My blood is all meridian: were it not,
I had not left my clime, nor should I be,
In spite of tortures, ne’er to be forgot,
A slave again to Love—at least of thee.”
And then again:
“A stranger loves the Lady of the land,
Born far beyond the mountains, but his blood
Is all meridian, as if never fanned
By the bleak wind that chills the polar flood.
“’Tis vain to struggle—let me perish young—
Live as I lived, and love as I have loved:
To dust if I return, from dust I sprung,
And then, at least, my heart can ne’er be moved.”
The conclusion here clearly is that Byron is committed to passion because his temperament compels it, and is very grateful to Madame Guiccioli for loving him, but that if Mary Chaworth should ever lift a little finger and beckon him, he would leave Madame Guiccioli and go to her.
So Mr. Edgcumbe argues; and he makes out his case—a case which we shall find nothing to contradict, and something to confirm when we get back to our story.