‘“... quæque ipse ... vidi,
Et quorum pars magna fui”?’
Surely the name that Byron dared not write, even in his own journal, was not that of Lady Frances Webster, whose name appears often in his correspondence. The ‘sacred name’ was that of one of whom he afterwards wrote, ‘Thou art both Mother and May.’
During October, November, and December, 1813, Byron’s mind was in a perturbed condition. We gather, from a letter which he wrote to Moore on November 30, that his thoughts were centred on a lady living in Nottinghamshire[41], and that the scrape, which he mentions in his letter to Augusta on November 8, referred to that lady and the dreaded prospects of maternity.
Mr. Coleridge believes that the verses, ‘Remember him, whom Passion’s power,’ were addressed to Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster. There is nothing, so far as the present writer knows, to support that opinion. There is no evidence to show the month in which they were written; and, in view of the statement that the lady in question had lived in comparative retirement, ‘Thy soul from long seclusion pure,’ and that she had, because of his presumption, banished the poet in 1813, it could not well have been Lady Frances Webster, who in September of that year had asked Byron to be godfather to her child, and in October had invited him to her house. It is noteworthy that Byron expressly forbade Murray to publish those verses with ‘The Corsair,’ where, it must be owned, they would have been sadly out of place. ‘Farewell, if ever fondest prayer,’ was decidedly more appropriate to the state of things existing at that time.
The motto chosen for his ‘Bride of Abydos’ is taken from Burns:
‘Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met—or never parted,
We had ne’er been broken-hearted.’
The poem was written early in November, 1813.
Byron has told us that it was written to divert his mind,[42] ‘to wring his thoughts from reality to imagination, from selfish regrets to vivid recollections’; to ‘distract his thoughts from the recollection of * * * * “Dear sacred name, rest ever unrevealed,”’ and in a letter to John Galt (December 11, 1813) he says that parts of the poem were drawn ‘from existence.’ He had been staying at Newstead, in close proximity to Annesley, from October 10 to November 8, during which time, as he says, he regretted the absence of his sister Augusta, ‘who might have saved him much trouble.’ He says, ‘All convulsions end with me in rhyme,’ and that ‘The Bride of Abydos’ was ‘the work of a week.’ In speaking of a ‘dear sacred name, rest ever unrevealed,’ he says: ‘At least even here my hand would tremble to write it’; and on November 30 he writes to Moore: ‘Since I last wrote’ (October 2), ‘much has happened to me.’ On November 27 he writes in his journal: ‘Mary—dear name—thou art both Mother and May.’[43] At the end of November, after he had returned to town, he writes in his journal:
‘* * * * is distant, and will be at * * * *, still more distant, till the spring. No one else, except Augusta, cares for me.... I am tremendously in arrears with my letters, except to * * * *, and to her my thoughts overpower me—my words never compass them.’
On November 14 Byron sends a device for the seals of himself and * * * *; the seal in question is at present in the possession of the Chaworth-Musters family. On December 10, we find from one of Byron’s letters that he had thoughts of committing suicide, and was deterred by the idea that ‘it would annoy Augusta, and perhaps * * * *.’