e works with which it teemed. Besides the third
Canto of Childe Harold and the Prisoner of Chillon, he produced also his
two poems, "Darkness" and "The Dream," the latter of which cost him many
a tear in writing,--being, indeed, the most mournful, as well as
picturesque, "story of a wandering life" that ever came from the pen and
heart of man. Those verses, too, entitled "The Incantation," which he
introduced afterwards, without any connection with the subject, into
Manfred, were also (at least, the less bitter portion of them) the
production of this period; and as they were written soon after the last
fruitless attempt at reconciliation, it is needless to say who was in
his thoughts while he penned some of the opening stanzas.

"Though thy slumber must be deep,
Yet thy spirit shall not sleep;
There are shades which will not vanish,
There are thoughts thou canst not banish;
By a power to thee unknown,
Thou canst never be alone;
Thou art wrapt as with a shroud,
Thou art gather'd in a cloud;
And for ever shalt thou dwell
In the spirit of this spell.

"Though thou see'st me not pass by,
Thou shalt feel me with thine eye,
As a thing that, though unseen,
Must be near thee, and hath been;
And when, in that secret dread,
Thou hast turn'd around thy head,
Thou shalt marvel I am not
As thy shadow on the spot,
And the power which thou dost feel
Shall be what thou must conceal."

Besides the unfinished "Vampire," he began also, at this time, another
romance in prose, founded upon the story of the Marriage of Belphegor,
and intended to shadow out his own matrimonial fate. The wife of this
satanic personage he described much in the same spirit that pervades his
delineation of Donna Inez in the first Canto of Don Juan. While engaged,
however, in writing this story, he heard from England that Lady Byron
was ill, and, his heart softening at the intelligence, he threw the
manuscript into the fire. So constantly were the good and evil
principles of his nature conflicting for mastery over him.[124]

The two following Poems, so different from each other in their
character,--the first prying with an awful scepticism into the darkness
of another world, and the second breathing all that is most natural and
tender in the affections of this,--were also written at this time, and
have never before been published.

[Footnote 116: Childe Harold, Canto iii.]