, air, stars,--all that springs from the great Whole,
Who hath produced, and will receive the soul,"

was hazardous, and almost that of an atheist. Atheist! he! who
considered atheists fools.

On leaving Venice for Ravenna,[6] where he had spent a few months, only
by way of distraction in the midst of his sorrows and serious
occupations, he was accused of dissolute conduct; and the serious
attachment which he had wished to avoid, but which had mastered his
whole heart, and induced him to live an isolated life with the person he
loved in a town of Romagna, far from all that could flatter his vanity
and from all intercourse with his countrymen, was brought against him to
show that he lived the life of an Epicurean, and brought misery into the
heart of families.

All this, no doubt, might have again called for his contempt, but on his
way from Ravenna to Pisa he wrote the outpourings of his mind in a poem,
the last lines of which are:--

"Oh Fame! if I e'er took delight in thy praises,
'Twas less for the sake of thy high-sounding phrases,
Than to see the bright eyes of the dear one discover,
The thought that I was not unworthy to love her.

"_There_ chiefly I sought thee, _there_ only I found thee;
Her glance was the best of the rays that surround thee;
When it sparkled o'er aught that was bright in my story,
I knew it was love, and I felt it was glory."

His heart was wounded by the persecutions to which those he loved were
subjected. His thoughts were for his daughter, who was growing up in the
midst of her father's enemies, and for his beloved sister who was
praying for him. He contemplated in the future the time when he could
show the moral and heroic power of his soul. He looked forward to the
great deeds by which he was going to astonish them, and perhaps call for
their admiration, instead of his writings, which had never reaped for
him any thing but pain.

"If I live," he wrote to Moore, "you will see that I shall do something
better than rhyming."

Truth however, when told by such men as Byron, and however ungraciously
received, must guide in the end the steps of those who walk in its wake.

This has been the case with Byron's poetry. Its influence over the minds
of Englishmen has been very salutary and great, and is one of the
principal causes which brought on a reform of the rooted prejudices and
opinions of the public in England, by the necessity under which it
placed them of lookin