ou have asked me to draw
the portrait of Lord Byron, and I have promised you that I would do so.
I now see that my promise was presumptuous. Every time I have endeavored
to trace it, I have had to put down my pen, discouraged as I was by the
fact of my always discovering too many obstacles between my
reminiscences and the possibility of expressing them. My attempts
appeared to me at times to be a profanation by the smallness of their
character; at others, they bore the mark of an extreme enthusiasm,
which, however, seemed to me very weak in its results and very
ridiculous in its want of power. Images which are preserved in thought
to a degree which may almost be considered supernatural, are susceptible
of too much change during the short transit of the mind to the pen.

The Almighty has created beings of such harmonious and ideal beauty that
they defy description or analysis. Such a one was Lord Byron. His
wonderful beauty of expression has never been rendered either by the
brush of the painter or the sculptor's chisel. It summed up in one
magnificent type the highest expression of every possible kind of
beauty. If his genius and his great heart could have chosen a human form
by which they could have been well represented, they could not have
chosen another! Genius shone in his very looks. All the effects and
emotions of a great soul were therein reflected as well as those of an
eminently good and generous heart, and indeed contrasts were visible
which are scarcely ever united in one and the same person. His eyes
seized and betrayed the sentiments which animated him, with a rapidity
and transparency such as called forth from Sir Walter Scott the remark,
that the fine head of his young rival "was like unto a beautiful
alabaster vase lightened up by an interior lamp." To see him, was to
understand thoroughly how really false were the calumnies spread about
as to his character. The mass, by their obstinacy in identifying him
with the imaginary types of his poems, and in judging him by a few
eccentricities of early youth, as well as by various bold thoughts and
expressions, had represented to themselves a factitious Byron, totally
at variance with the real man. Calumnies, which unfortunately he passed
over in disdainful silence, have circulated as acknowledged facts. Time
has destroyed many, but it would not be correct to say that they have
all entirely been destroyed. Lord Byron was silent, because he depended
upon time to