In Lady Blessington's Conversations with Lord Byron, pages 176, 177., the poet is represented as stating that the lines—
"While Memory, with more than Egypt's art,
Embalming all the sorrows of the heart,
Sits at the altar which she raised to woe,
And feeds the source whence tears eternal flow!"
suggested to his mind, "by an unaccountable and incomprehensible power of association," the thought—
"Memory, the mirror which affliction dashes to the earth, and, looking down upon the fragments, only beholds the reflection multiplied."
afterwards apparently embodied in Childe Harold, iii. 33.
"Even as a broken mirror, which the glass
In every fragment multiplies; and makes