outhwell, a village halfway
between Mansfield and Newark. Southwell was sleepy, gossipy, dull--and
exerted a wholesome restraint on our restless youth. It was simply a
question of economy that took Byron and his mother to Southwell. The
run-down estate of Newstead was yielding a meager income, but at Southwell
one could be shabby and yet respectable.

At Southwell Byron met John Pigot and his sister--cultured people of a
refined and quiet sort. Byron took to them at once, and they liked him.

In a country town the person who thinks, instinctively hunts out the other
man who thinks--granting the somewhat daring hypothesis that there are two
of them. So Byron and the Pigots often met for walks and talks, and on
such occasions the poet would read to his friends the scraps of verse he
had written. He had gotten into the habit--he wrote whenever his pulse ran
up above eighty--he wrote because he could not help it; and he read his
productions to his friends for the same reason. Every one who writes longs
to read his work to some sympathetic soul. A thought is not ours until we
repeat it to another, and this crying need of expression marks every
poetic soul. All art is born of feeling, high, intense, holy feeling, and
the creative faculty is largely a matter of temperature. We feel, and not
to impart our feelings is stagnation--death. People who do not feel deeply
never have anything to impart, either to individuals or to the world. They
have no message.

The young man, fresh from the dusty, musty lectures of Cambridge, and out
of the reach of his boisterous and carousing companions, grasped at the
gentle, refined and sympathetic friendship of this brother and sister. The
trinity would walk off across the fields and recline on the soft turf
under a great spreading tree, reading aloud by turn from some good book.
Such meetings always ended by Byron's reading to his friends any chance
rhymes he had written since they last met.

John Morley dates the birth of Byron's poetic genius from his meeting with
Miss Chaworth, while Taine names Southwell as the pivotal point. Probably
both are right.

But this we know, that it was the Pigots who induced Byron to collect his
rhymes and have them printed. This was done at the neighboring town of
Newark, when Byron was nineteen years old. Possibly you have a few of
these thin, poorly printed, crudely bound little books entitled
"Juvenilia" around in the garret somewhere, and, if so, it mi