Moore took care, with his asterisks, that we should not know the nature of that scrape, which certainly had nothing to do with his ‘Lines to a Lady Weeping’ which appeared in the first edition of ‘The Corsair.’ If the reader has any doubts on this point, let him refer to Byron’s letters to Murray, notably to that one in which the angry poet protests against the suppression of those lines in the second edition of ‘The Corsair’:
‘You have played the devil by that injudicious suppression, which you did totally without my consent.... Now, I do not, and will not be supposed to shrink, although myself and everything belonging to me were to perish with my memory.’
Moore’s asterisks veiled the record of a deeper scrape, as Byron’s letter to him, written three weeks later, plainly show.
On April 10, 1814, Byron wrote in his journal:
‘I do not know that I am happiest when alone; but this I am sure of, that I am never long in the society even of her I love (God knows too well, and the Devil probably too), without a yearning for the company of my lamp, and my utterly confused and tumbled-over library.’
The latter portion of the journal at this period is much mutilated. There is a gap between April 10 and 19, when, four days after the birth of Medora, he writes in deep dejection:
‘There is ice at both poles, north and south—all extremes are the same—misery belongs to the highest and the lowest, only.... I will keep no further journal ... and, to prevent me from returning, like a dog, to the vomit of memory, I tear out the remaining leaves of this volume.... “O! fool! I shall go mad.”’
It was at this time that Byron wrote the following lines, in which he tells Mary Chaworth that all danger of the discovery of their secret is over:
‘There is no more for me to hope,
There is no more for thee to fear;
And, if I give my sorrow scope,
That sorrow thou shalt never hear.
Why did I hold thy love so dear?
Why shed for such a heart one tear?
Let deep and dreary silence be
My only memory of thee!
When all are fled who flatter now,
Save thoughts which will not flatter then;
And thou recall’st the broken vow
To him who must not love again—
Each hour of now forgotten years
Thou, then, shalt number with thy tears;
And every drop of grief shall be
A vain remembrancer of me!’
On May 4, 1814, Byron sent to Moore the following verses. We quote from Lady Byron’s manuscript: