st miss his master; poor
boy! he would scarcely go back."

This letter alone shows a freshness of feeling quite consolatory;
certainly "Childe Harold" was not capable of it.

But despite all these proofs of his good-humor, gayety, and
antimisanthropical dispositions, we could cite persons who, even at this
period, thought him melancholy. Mr. Galt, for instance, whom chance had
brought in contact with him, having met on the same vessel going from
Gibraltar to Greece; and then the British ambassador at Constantinople,
Mr. Adair, and even Mr. Bruce, at Athens. How then shall we reconcile
these opposite testimonies? It may be done by analyzing his fits of
melancholy, observing the time and places of their manifestation.

I have said that Lord Byron's melancholy had always real or probable
causes (only capable of aggravation from his extremely sensitive
temperament), and it has been seen that superabundant causes existed
when he left England. That during the whole period of his absence, they
may, from time to time, have cast some shade over him, notwithstanding
his natural gayety and his strength of mind, is at least very probable.
But did Mr. Galt, Mr. Adair, and Mr. Bruce, really witness the return
of these impressions? or would it not be more natural to believe, since
that better agrees with the observations made by those living constantly
with him, that, through some resemblance of symptoms, they may have
taken for melancholy another psychological phenomenon generally
remarked--namely, _the necessity of solitude_, experienced by a high
meditative and poetic nature like his? Indeed, what does Galt say?--

"When night arrived and there were lights in the vessel, he held himself
aloof, took his station on the rail, between the pegs on which the
sheets are belayed and the shrouds, and there, for hours, sat in
silence, enamored, as people say, of the moon. He was often strangely
absent--it may have been from his genius; and, had its sombre grandeur
been then known, this conduct might have been explained; but, at the
time, it threw as it were, around him the sackcloth of penitence.
Sitting amid the shrouds and rattlings, in the tranquillity of the
moonlight, composing melodies scarcely formed in his mind, he seemed
almost an apparition, suggesting dim reminiscences of him who shot the
albatross. He was as a mystery in a winding-sheet crowned with a halo.

"The influence of the incomprehensible phantasma which hovered about