Lake Leman lies by Chillon's walls;
A thousand feet in depth below,
Its massy waters meet and flow,—
bring before us in a few words the conditions of a hopeless bondage. The account of the prisoner himself, and of the lingering deaths of the brothers; the first frenzy of the survivor, and the desolation which succeeds it—
I only loved: I only drew
The accursed breath of dungeon dew,—
the bird's song breaking on the night of his solitude; his growing enamoured of despair, and regaining his freedom with a sigh, are all strokes from a master hand. From the same place, at the same date, he announces to Murray the completion of the third canto of Childe Harold. The productiveness of July is portentous. During that month he wrote the Monody on Sheridan, The Dream, Churchill's Grave, the Sonnet to Lake Leman, Could I remount the River of my Years, part of Manfred, Prometheus, the Stanzas to Augusta, beginning,
My sister! My sweet sister! If a name
Dearer and purer were, it should be thine;
and the terrible dream of Darkness, which at least in the ghastly power of the close, where the survivors meet by the lurid light of a dim altar fire, and die of each other's hideousness, surpasses Campbell's Last Man[1]. At Lausanne the poet made a pilgrimage to the haunts of Gibbon, broke a sprig from his acacia-tree, and carried off some rose leaves from his garden. Though entertaining friends, among them Mr. M.G. Lewis and Scrope Davies, he systematically shunned "the locust swarm of English tourists," remarking on their obtrusive platitudes; as when he heard one of them at Chamouni inquire, "Did you ever see anything more truly rural?" Ultimately he got tired of the Calvinistic Genevese—one of whom is said to have swooned as he entered the room—and early in October set out with Hobhouse for Italy. They crossed the Simplon, and proceeded by the Lago Maggiore to Milan, admiring the pass, but slighting the somewhat hothouse beauties of the Borromean Islands. From Milan he writes, pronouncing its cathedral to be only a little inferior to that of Seville, and delighted with "a correspondence, all original and amatory, between Lucretia Borgia and Cardinal Bembo." He secured a lock of the golden hair of the Pope's daughter, and wished himself a cardinal.
[Footnote 1: This only appeared in 1831, but Campbell claims to have given Byron in conversation the suggestion of the subject.]
At Verona, Byron dilates on the amphitheatre, as surpassing anything he had seen even in Greece, and on the faith of the people in the story of Juliet, from whose reputed tomb he sent some pieces of granite to Ada and his nieces. In November we find him settled in Venice, "the greenest isle of his imagination." There he began to form those questionable alliances which are so marked a feature of his life, and so frequent a theme in his letters, that it is impossible to pass them without notice. The first of his temporary idols was Mariana Segati, "the wife of a merchant of Venice," for some time his landlord. With this woman, whom he describes as an antelope with oriental eyes, wavy hair, voice like the cooing of a dove, and the spirit of a Bacchante, he remained on terms of intimacy for about eighteen months, during which their mutual devotion was only disturbed by some outbursts of jealousy. In December the poet took lessons in Armenian, glad to find in the study something craggy to break his mind upon. Ho translated into that language a portion of St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians. Notes on the carnival, praises of Christabel, instructions about the printing of Childe Harold (iii.), protests against the publication under his name of some spurious "domestic poems," and constant references, doubtfully domestic, to his Adriatic lady, fill up the records of 1816. On February 15, 1817, he announces to Murray the completion of the first sketch of Manfred, and alludes to it in a bantering manner as "a kind of poem in dialogue, of a wild metaphysical and inexplicable kind;" concluding, "I have at least rendered it quite impossible for the stage, for which my intercourse with Drury Lane has given me the greatest contempt."
About this time Byron seems to have entertained the idea of returning to England in the spring, i.e. after a year's absence. This design, however, was soon set aside, partly in consequence of a slow malarian fever, by which he was prostrated for several weeks. On his partial recovery, attributed to his having had neither medicine nor doctor, and a determination to live till he had "put one or two people out of the world," he started on an expedition to Rome.
His first stage was Arqua; then Ferrara, where he was inspired, by a sight of the Italian poet's prison, with the Lament of Tasso; the next, Florence, where he describes himself as drunk with the beauty of the galleries. Among the pictures, he was most impressed with the mistresses of Raphael and Titian, to whom, along with Giorgione, he is always reverential; and he recognized in Santa Croce the Westminster Abbey of Italy. Passing through Foligno, he reached his destination early in May, and met his old friends, Lord Lansdowne and Hobhouse. The poet employed his short time at Rome in visiting on horseback the most famous sites in the city and neighbourhood—as the Alban Mount, Tivoli, Frascati, the Falls of Terni, and the Clitumnus—re-casting the crude first draft of the third act of Manfred, and sitting for his bust to Thorwaldsen. Of this sitting the sculptor afterwards gave some account to his compatriot, Hans Andersen: "Byron placed himself opposite to me, but at once began to put on a quite different expression from that usual to him. 'Will you not sit still?' said I. 'You need not assume that look.' 'That is my expression,' said Byron. 'Indeed,' said I; and I then represented him as I wished. When the bust was finished he said, 'It is not at all like me; my expression is more unhappy.'" West, the American, who five years later painted his lordship at Leghorn, substantiates the above half-satirical anecdote, by the remark, "He was a bad sitter; he assumed a countenance that did not belong to him, as though he were thinking of a frontispiece for Chlde Harold." Thorwaldsen's bust, the first cast of which was sent to Hobhouse, and pronounced by Mrs. Leigh to be the best of the numerous likenesses of her brother, was often repeated. Professor Brandes, of Copenhagen, introduces his striking sketch of the poet by a reference to the model, that has its natural place in the museum named from the great sculptor whose genius had flung into the clay the features of a character so unlike his own. The bust, says the Danish critic, at first sight impresses one with an undefinable classic grace; on closer examination the restlessness of a life is reflected in a brow over which clouds seem to hover, but clouds from which we look for lightnings. The dominant impression of the whole is that of some irresistible power (Unwiderstehlichkeit). Thorwaldsen, at a much later date (1829-1833) executed the marble statue, first intended for the Abbey, which is now to be seen in the library of Trinity College, in evidence that Cambridge is still proud of her most brilliant son.