es, "Fare thee well," and "A Sketch," made their appearance in the
newspapers:--and while the latter poem was generally and, it must be
owned, justly condemned, as a sort of literary assault on an obscure
female, whose situation ought to have placed her as much _beneath_ his
satire as the undignified mode of his attack certainly raised her
_above_ it, with regard to the other poem, opinions were a good deal
more divided. To many it appeared a strain of true conjugal tenderness,
a kind of appeal, which no woman with a heart could resist: while by
others, on the contrary, it was considered to be a mere showy effusion
of sentiment, as difficult for real feeling to have produced as it was
easy for fancy and art, and altogether unworthy of the deep interests
involved in the subject. To this latter opinion, I confess my own to
have, at first, strongly inclined; and suspicious as I could not help
regarding the sentiment that could, at such a moment, indulge in such
verses, the taste that prompted or sanctioned their publication appeared
to me even still more questionable. On reading, however, his own account
of all the circumstances in the Memoranda, I found that on both points I
had, in common with a large portion of the public, done him injustice.
He there described, and in a manner whose sincerity there was no
doubting, the swell of tender recollections under the influence of
which, as he sat one night musing in his study, these stanzas were
produced,--the tears, as he said, falling fast over the paper as he
wrote them. Neither, from that account, did it appear to have been from
any wish or intention of his own, but through the injudicious zeal of a
friend whom he had suffered to take a copy, that the verses met the
public eye.

The appearance of these poems gave additional violence to the angry and
inquisitorial feeling now abroad against him; and the title under which
both pieces were immediately announced by various publishers, as "Poems
by Lord Byron on his domestic Circumstances," carried with it a
sufficient exposure of the utter unfitness of such themes for rhyme. It
is, indeed, only in those emotions and passions, of which imagination
forms a predominant ingredient,--such as love, in its first dreams,
before reality has come to embody or dispel them, or sorrow, in its
wane, when beginning to pass away from the heart into the fancy,--that
poetry ought ever to be employed as an interpreter of feeling. For the
expressi