But, at the time when we first met, his position in the world was most
solitary. Even those coffee-house companions who, before his departure
from England, had served him as a sort of substitute for more worthy
society, were either relinquished or had dispersed; and, with the
exception of three or four associates of his college days (to whom he
appeared strongly attached), Mr. Dallas and his solicitor seemed to be
the only persons whom, even in their very questionable degree, he could
boast of as friends. Though too proud to complain of this loneliness, it
was evident that he felt it; and that the state of cheerless isolation,
"unguided and unfriended," to which, on entering into manhood, he had
found himself abandoned, was one of the chief sources of that resentful
disdain of mankind, which even their subsequent worship of him came too
late to remove. The effect, indeed, which his subsequent commerce with
society had, for the short period it lasted, in softening and
exhilarating his temper, showed how fit a soil his heart would have been
for the growth of all the kindlier feelings, had but a portion of this
sunshine of the world's smiles shone on him earlier.

At the same time, in all such speculations and conjectures as to what
_might_ have been, under more favourable circumstances, his character,
it is invariably to be borne in mind, that his very defects were among
the elements of his greatness, and that it was out of the struggle
between the good and evil principles of his nature that his mighty
genius drew its strength. A more genial and fostering introduction into
life, while it would doubtless have softened and disciplined his mind,
might have impaired its vigour; and the same influences that would have
diffused smoothness and happiness over his life might have been fatal to
its glory. In a short poem of his[39], which appears to have been
produced at Athens, (as I find it written on a leaf of the original MS.
of Childe Harold, and dated "Athens, 1811,") there are two lines which,
though hardly intelligible as connected with the rest of the poem, may,
taken separately, be interpreted as implying a sort of prophetic
consciousness that it was out of the wreck and ruin of all his hopes the
immortality of his name was to arise.

"Dear object of defeated care,
Though now of love and thee bereft,
To reconcile me with despair,
Thine image and my tears are left.
'Tis said with sorrow Time can c