"But in all, the recollections of bitterness, and more especially of recent and more home desolation, which must accompany one through life, have preyed upon me here; and neither the music of the shepherd, the crashing of the avalanche, or the torrent, the mountain, the glacier, the forest, or the cloud, have for one moment lightened the weight upon my heart, or enabled me to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty, and the power, and the glory around, above, and beneath me."
The close of Byron's life, in Greece, seems to have been one of peculiar desolation. There is something really tragic in the utter loneliness of such a death-bed. Years before, he had written concerning his death:—
"When time or soon or late shall bring
The dreamless sleep that lulls the dead,
Oblivion! may thy languid wing
Wave gently o'er my dying bed.
"No band of friends or heirs be there
To weep, or wish the coming blow;
No maiden with dishevelled hair
To feel, or feign, decorous woe.
"But silent let me sink to earth,
With no officious mourners near;
I would not mar one hour of rest
Or startle friendship with a tear."
Never was wish more literally fulfilled than this. There were none but servants about him in his last hours:—
"In all these attendants," says Parry, "there was an over-officiousness of zeal; but as they could not understand each other's language their zeal only added to the confusion. This circumstance, and the want of common necessaries, made Byron's apartment such a picture at distress and even anguish during the last two or three days of his life as never before beheld, and have no wish to witness again."
His remains were taken to England and interred in the family vault in the Church of Hucknall. His poems are his imperishable monument.
