The evening wears on: the guests depart: the clear spring moonlight streams upon the winding Arno. Byron stands dreaming at the open window, the bridges and buildings of Pisa lie still and silver-lit before him: a subtle influence of quietude steals down upon him from the stars. "What nothings we are," he murmurs, "before the least of these stars!" One in particular—is it Sirius?—entrances his attention with its cold refulgence of pure light. His thoughts involuntarily shape themselves in rhythm and rhyme;

Sun of the sleepless! melancholy star!
Whose tearful beam glows tremulously far,
That show'st the darkness thou canst not dispel,
How like art thou to joy remember'd well!
So gleams the past, the light of other days,
Which shines, but warms not with its powerless rays;
A night-beam Sorrow watcheth to behold,
Distinct, but distant—clear—but oh! how cold!

It is the hour when Byron's brain becomes thronged with a glowing phantasmagoria of ideas that cry aloud for visible expression. He forgets, under the stress of creative impulse, the sources and causes of his inherent melancholy,—the miserable days of his childhood, with a Fury for a mother,—the wound, never to be healed, of his unrequited love for Mary Chaworth,—the inimical wife from whom he is eternally alienated,—the little daughter that he may never hold in his arms,—the beloved sister separated from his side,—the ancestral home of his forefathers now passed into a stranger's hold,—the meteoric glory and total eclipse of his unparalleled popularity in England,—the follies, and worse than follies, which have made him what he is, "consistent in nothing but his passion and his pride." These memories, like poisonous exhalations, are banished from his mind, and leave a clear horizon for a while,—a fertile landscape peopled with great words and images. Something akin to inspiration seizes upon him: and he throws himself to work with all the zest and nerve of his impulsive nature.

This is a man who writes, in his own phrase, "with rapidity and rarely with pains…. When I once take pen in hand, I must say what comes uppermost or fling it away." Not for him that careful polishing of sentences, which other writers meticulously bestow. "I have always written as fast as I could put pen to paper, and never revised but in the proofs…. I can never recast anything. I am like the tiger; if I miss the first spring, I go grumbling back to my jungle." And to this impetuous directness of onslaught, his finest poems bear witness. Some critic has remarked that Byron is too much of the earth earthy to be a great lyrical writer: yet a Promethean fire, stolen from heaven, burns immortally through some of his shorter lyrics. In Greek, it is said, there are 1632 ways of expressing the simple fact I love you: yet who has ever put it in a more convincing form than Byron does in Maid of Athens?

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MAID OF ATHENS
By those tresses unconfined,
Woo'd by each Ægean wind;
By those lids whose jetty fringe
Kiss thy soft cheeks' blooming tinge;
By those wild eyes like the roe,
Zöe mou, sas agapo.
Maid of Athens, ere we part,
Give, oh give me back my heart!
Or, since that has left my breast,
Keep it now, and take the rest!
Hear my vow before I go.
Zöe mou, sas agapo.
(My life, I love you!)
By those tresses unconfined,
Woo'd by each Ægean wind;
By those lids whose jetty fringe
Kiss thy soft cheeks' blooming tinge;
By those wild eyes like the roe,
Zöe mou, sas agapo.
By that lip I long to taste;
By that zone-encircled waist;
By all the token-flowers that tell
What words can never speak so well;
By love's alternate joy and woe,
Zöe mou, sas agapo.
Maid of Athens! I am gone:
Think of me, sweet! when alone.
Though I fly to Istambol,
Athens holds my heart and soul:
Can I cease to love thee? No!
Zöe mou, sas agapo.

Rapidly as his pen flies over the paper, the torrent of throbbing thought flows faster still. Far on into the night, when ghostly noises echo through the sleeping palace, "that ever-gushing and perennial fount of natural waters," as Scott has described the genius of Byron, pours forth in reckless profusion. Until at last, outspent with energy, he draws a deep breath of exhaustion, and realizes that he is weariness itself. The moon has sunk in Arno: the stars are half-way across the sky: a cold glimmer of dawn is palpitating along the East, as Byron—