f the work alone remained to be done. The
elaboration and meditation of it had taken place almost unknown to
himself, so that his conceptions remained latent, and took their shape
by degrees in his brain, before being fixed in his writings. He penned
"Childe Harold" at Janina and Athens; but it was on the vessel's deck,
in that dreamy attitude just seen by Mr. Galt, that he had moulded the
clay of his first statue, and given it an immortal form. Could he have
done so, if he had always remained in society on deck, laughing, joking,
giving way to all his charming, witty bursts of gayety, as he did while
coasting the shores of Sicily, when, from time to time, his playful
nature enabled him not only to forget the wounds of his heart, and the
disagreeable remembrances left behind, but also to impose silence on the
severe requirements of his genius?

The same causes must have produced the same opinions from the British
ambassador at Constantinople. Without even speaking of the irksomeness
of etiquette, always so distasteful to Lord Byron, that Moore looks upon
it as one of the causes of the apparent sadness remarked by Adair, we
ought to remember that he left Constantinople on board the same frigate
as the ambassador, making a sea-voyage of four days with him. During
these four days, it is likely that Lord Byron did not deny himself
solitude, and that he also courted the secret influences exercised by
starry nights on the Bosphorus as he had done under similar
circumstances on the AEgean Sea. But he had yet another motive for
sadness during this passage, since he was then about to separate from
his friend and fellow-traveller, Hobhouse, who was obliged to go back to
England. Thus, for the first time, Lord Byron would soon find himself
alone in a foreign land. The effect produced by this situation must have
shown itself in his countenance; for he was experiencing beforehand
quite a new sensation, wherein any satisfaction at perfect independence
and solitude must have been more than counterbalanced in his feeling,
grateful, and in reality most sociable nature, by real grief at such a
separation. And I doubt not that when setting foot on the barren isle of
Chios, with its jutting rocks and tall rugged-looking mountains, just
after having bade Hobhouse adieu, I doubt not that his heart experienced
one of those burning suffocating feelings that belong equally to intense
sorrow and joy. When, then, a few days later, he wrote to his