these inanimate mementoes has power to call up
recollections even to ordinary imaginations. What, then, must have been
the vividness with which they acted on an imagination like Lord Byron's?
His heart softened toward her, and he recollected that one day, under
the influence of sorrows which well-nigh robbed him of consciousness, he
had answered her harshly. Thinking himself in the wrong, and full of the
anguish that all these reflections and objects excited in his breast, he
allowed his tears to flow, and, snatching a pen, wrote down that
touching effusion, which somewhat eased his suffering.

The next day one of his friends found these beautiful verses on his
desk; and, judging of Lady Byron's heart and that of the public
according to his own, he imprudently gave them to the world. Thus we
can no more doubt Lord Byron's sincerity in writing them than we can
accuse him of publishing them. But what may cause astonishment is that
they could possibly have been ill-interpreted, as they were; and, above
all, that this touching "Farewell"--which made Madame de Stael say she
would gladly have been unhappy, like Lady Byron, to draw it forth--that
it should not have had power to rescue her heart from its apathy, and
bring her to the feet of her husband, or at least into his arms. Let us
add, in conclusion, that the most atrocious part of this affair, and
doubtless the most wounding for him, was precisely Lady Byron's conduct;
and in this conduct the worst was _her cruel silence_!

She has been called, after his words, the moral Clytemnestra[148] of her
husband. Such a surname is severe; but the repugnance we feel to
condemning a woman can not prevent our listening to the voice of
justice, which tells us that the comparison is still in favor of the
guilty one of antiquity. For she, driven to crime by fierce passion
overpowering reason, at least only deprived her husband of physical
life, and in committing the deed exposed herself to all its
consequences; while Lady Byron left her husband at the very moment that
she saw him struggling amid a thousand shoals, in the stormy sea of
embarrassments created by his marriage, and precisely when he more than
ever required a friendly, tender, and indulgent hand to save him from
the tempests of life. Besides, she shut herself up in silence a thousand
times more cruel than Clytemnestra's poniard, that only killed the body;
whereas Lady Byron's silence was destined to kill the soul, and such