How much more, Lake of Beauty, do we feel
In sweetly gliding o’er thy crystal sea
The wild glow of that not ungentle zeal
Which of the Heirs of Immortality
Is proud and makes the breath of Glory real.”
Can it be that Lord Byron pronounced “real” as if it were a monosyllable? But he also wrote “There let it lay!”
There are, on the shores of Lake Geneva, several hotels associated with Byron. At the Anchor Inn, still extant at Ouchy, he wrote that misleading rhapsody—“The Prisoner of Chillon.”
He had in 1816 definitely separated from his wife and had shaken the dust of England from his poetic shoes. Percy Bysshe Shelley with his wife and daughter, Williams, and Jane Clairmont, Mary Shelley’s half-sister, were established at Sécheron, a suburb of Geneva. Byron had never met the Poet of the Sky-lark, but Jane Clairmont, who was a passionate, fiery-eyed brunette, imbued with her father’s ideas of free love, had begun her unfortunate liaison with him, having deliberately thrown herself into his arms. They had met clandestinely a number of times just before their departure from England.
Byron and Shelley were both fond of sailing and they had many excursions on the lake. One evening they were out together when the bise, as the strong northwest wind is called, was blowing. They drifted before it and, getting into the current of the Rhône, were carried swiftly toward the piles at the entrance of Geneva harbour. It required all the strength of their boatmen to extricate them from the danger.