appy
woman, much given to the reading of poetry and of the immoral novels of
that time and place.

That she should love Byron at first sight was inevitable, and that which
followed was almost as inevitable. She herself thus describes her first
acquaintance with him:--

"His noble and exquisitely beautiful countenance, the tone of his
voice, his manners, the thousand enchantments that surrounded him,
rendered him so different and so superior a being to any by whom I
was surrounded or had hitherto seen that it was impossible he
should not have left the most profound impression upon me. From
that evening, during the whole of my subsequent stay at Venice, we
met every day."

Almost the only glimpses of quiet happiness which Byron ever enjoyed
came from this association. The lovers seemed to be admirably adapted to
each other, and their love knew no diminution during the short remainder
of his life. And she cherished his memory with the utmost fondness
throughout a long life, writing of him with unbounded enthusiasm, in her
own account of her acquaintance with him, many years after his death.
Byron has probably exaggerated his own unhappiness, yet there can be no
doubt that much of what he describes was very real. The nobler elements
of his character were constantly at war with the lower, and although he
did not have sufficient strength of character to lead the noble life of
which he had frequent visions, he had enough innate nobility to despise
himself for the life he did lead. Doubtless there was much of truth in
what he wrote in his journal in Switzerland:--

"But in all, the recollections of bitterness, and more especially
of recent and more home desolation, which must accompany one
through life, have preyed upon me here; and neither the music of
the shepherd, the crashing of the avalanche, or the torrent, the
mountain, the glacier, the forest, or the cloud, have for one
moment lightened the weight upon my heart, or enabled me to lose my
own wretched identity in the majesty, and the power, and the glory
around, above, and beneath me."

The close of Byron's life, in Greece, seems to have been one of peculiar
desolation. There is something really tragic in the utter loneliness of
such a death-bed. Years before, he had written concerning his death:--

"When time or soon or late shall bring
The dreamless sleep that lulls the dead,
Obli