to learn this to his
cost. He was to feel, though vaguely, that he might just as well aspire
to the civic as to the military crown; be an orator in the senate, or a
hero on the field of battle.

Among all the careers presenting themselves before him, the one that
flattered him least was to be an author or a literary man. But he was
living in the midst of young men well versed in letters. Most of them
amused themselves with making verses. To tranquillize his heart, and
exercise his activity of mind, he also made some, but without attaching
any great importance to them. These verses were charming; the first
flower and perfume of a young, pure soul, devoted to friendship and
other generous emotions. Nevertheless, a criticism that was at once
malignant, unjust, and cruel, fell foul of these delightful, clever
inspirations. The injustice committed was great. The modest, gentle, but
no less sensitive mind of the youth was both indignant and overwhelmed
at it. Other sorrows, other illusions dispelled, further increased his
agitation, making a wound that might really have become misanthropy, had
his heart been less excellent by nature. But it could not rankle thus in
him, and his sufferings only resulted in making him quit England with
less regret, and throw into his verses and letters misanthropical
expressions, no sooner written than disavowed by the general tone of
cordiality and good-humor that reigned throughout them; and, lastly, by
suggesting the imprudent idea of choosing a misanthrope as the hero of
the poem in which he was to sing his own pilgrimage.

This necessity of essaying and giving expression to his genius also made
him desire solitude yet more. He found poetic loneliness beneath the
bright skies of the East, where he pitched his tent, slowly to seek the
road to that fame for which his soul thirsted. But when he arrived at
it,--when he became transformed, so to say, into an idol,--did this
necessity for solitude abandon him? By no means.

"_April 10th._--I do not know that I am happiest when alone," he writes
in his memoranda; "but this I am sure of, I never am long in the society
even of her I love--and God knows how I love her--without a yearning for
the company of my lamp and my library. Even in the day, I send away my
carriage oftener than I use or abuse it."

This desire, this craving for his lamp and his library,--this absence of
taste for certain realities of life,--show affinities between Lord Byron