to the floor insensible. They
raised her and placed her in her bed, from which she never rose; she was
borne from it to her grave.

Such was the devotion which his fatal beauty and fascination won from
women, from many women, in his brief life. It is not probable that his
wife ever loved him in this way, but had she done so it seems very
unlikely that they could have lived a happy life together.

For one reason, he had no faith in women. "False as a woman or an
epitaph" expressed his deliberate opinion of the sex; and it must be
confessed that the sort of women with whom he had best acquaintance were
not calculated to give him high ideas upon the subject. This low
estimate of women would have stood in the way of domestic happiness
under any circumstances.

He was not ignorant of this, and in "Childe Harold" states the case
thus:--

"For he through sin's long labyrinth had run,
Nor made atonement when he did amiss;
Had sighed to many, though he loved but one,
And that loved one, alas! could ne'er be his.
Ah, happy she! to 'scape from him whose kiss
Had been pollution unto aught so chaste!
Who soon had left her charms for vulgar bliss,
And spoiled her goodly lands to gild his waste,
Nor calm domestic bliss had ever deigned to taste."

It has been thought by some that had Byron had the good fortune to meet
his latest love, the Countess Guiccioli, in his youth, all his stormy
life might have been changed and redeemed. However this may be, she
seems, so far as we can judge of her, to have been more likely to be a
poet's one great love than any of the others who for a time held his
wandering fancy. Beautiful as a poet's wildest dream, young, ardent,
gifted, and passionately devoted to him, what more could even his
exacting nature demand?--

"Educated in the gloom of the convent, the notes of the organ, the
clouds of incense, the waxen tapers burning at the feet of the
Virgin, the litanies of the nuns,--all this had filled her mind
with the poetry of the cloister, and with that mystic and
indefinable love which at the first contact with the world was
ready to change into a violent passion when it should meet with an
object upon which to fix itself."

Married as soon as she left the convent to a man selected by her
parents, whom she had barely seen, and who was old enough to be her
father, she was at the time Byron first saw her a melancholy and unh