tle stream,
throwing its boughs half-way to the opposite margin. I dare not
revisit that spot, for there we were wont to meet (poor children
that we were!), thinking not of the world we had scarce entered,
dreaming not of fate and chance, full only of our first-born, our
ineffable love. It was so unlike the love of grown-up people; so
pure that not one wrong thought ever crossed it, and yet so
passionate that never again have I felt any emotion comparable to
the intensity of its tumultuous tenderness."

When the meetings so feelingly described became known to the lady's
father, she was sent away at once, and Bulwer never saw her again. Very
soon after, she was forced into a marriage against which her heart
protested. For three years she strove to smother the love which consumed
her; and when she sunk under the conflict, and death was about to
relieve her, she wrote to Bulwer informing him of the sufferings she had
undergone, affirming her deathless love, and begging him to visit her
grave.

His son says:--

"The impressions left on my father by this early phantom of delight
were indelible and colored the whole of his afterlife. He
believed that far beyond all other influences they shaped his
character, and they never ceased to haunt his memory. Allusions to
it are constantly recurring in all his published works, and in none
of them more than in the last of all. He was much affected by them,
and not knowing to what they referred, we wondered that the
creations of his fancy should exercise such power over him. They
were not creations of fancy, but the memories of fifty years past."

After the abrupt end of his first romance he conceived a sort of
friendship for Lady Caroline Lamb, which came very near the verge of
love. Lady Caroline was between thirty and forty years old at this time,
it being subsequent to her intrigue with Lord Byron. She looked much
younger than her age,--thanks, perhaps, to a slight rounded figure and a
child-like mode of wearing her pale golden hair in loose curls. She had
large hazel eyes, good teeth, and a pleasant laugh. She had to a
surpassing degree the qualities that charm, and never failed to please.
Her conversation was remarkable, and she was the only woman, Byron said,
who never bored him. She was a creature of caprice, and impulse, and
whim, and had been known to send a page around to all her guests a