t driven on the piles; and it
required all our rowers' strength to master the tide. The waves were
high and inspiriting--we were all animated by our contest with the
elements. 'I will sing you an Albanian song,' cried Lord Byron; 'now, be
sentimental and give me all your attention.' It was a strange, wild
howl that he gave forth; but such as, he declared, was an exact
imitation of the savage Albanian mode,--laughing, the while, at our
disappointment, who had expected a wild Eastern melody."

Sometimes the party landed, for a walk upon the shore, and, on such
occasions, Lord Byron would loiter behind the rest, lazily trailing his
sword-stick along, and moulding, as he went, his thronging thoughts into
shape. Often too, when in the boat, he would lean abstractedly over the
side, and surrender himself up, in silence, to the same absorbing task.

The conversation of Mr. Shelley, from the extent of his poetic reading,
and the strange, mystic speculations into which his system of philosophy
led him, was of a nature strongly to arrest and interest the attention
of Lord Byron, and to turn him away from worldly associations and topics
into more abstract and untrodden ways of thought. As far as contrast,
indeed, is an enlivening ingredient of such intercourse, it would be
difficult to find two persons more formed to whet each other's faculties
by discussion, as on few points of common interest between them did
their opinions agree; and that this difference had its root deep in the
conformation of their respective minds needs but a glance through the
rich, glittering labyrinth of Mr. Shelley's pages to assure us.

In Lord Byron, the real was never forgotten in the fanciful. However
Imagination had placed her whole realm at his disposal, he was no less a
man of this world than a ruler of hers; and, accordingly, through the
airiest and most subtile creations of his brain still the life-blood of
truth and reality circulates. With Shelley it was far otherwise;--his
fancy (and he had sufficient for a whole generation of poets) was the
medium through which he saw all things, his facts as well as his
theories; and not only the greater part of his poetry, but the political
and philosophical speculations in which he indulged, were all distilled
through the same over-refining and unrealising alembic. Having started
as a teacher and reformer of the world, at an age when he could know
nothing of the world but from fancy, the persecution he m