your brow;
Be still, as you were wont to be,
Spotless as you've been known to me,--
Be still as you are now.

And though some trifling share of praise,
To cheer my last declining days,
To me were doubly dear,
While blessing your beloved name,
I'd waive at once a _poet's_ fame,
To prove a _prophet_ here.

In 1821, as he was going to Pisa, Byron met his old and dear friend
Clare on the route to Bologna, and speaks of their meeting in the
following terms:--

"'There is a strange coincidence sometimes in the little things of this
world, Sancho,' says Sterne, in a letter (if I mistake not), and so I
have often found it. At page 128, article 91, of this collection, I had
alluded to my friend Lord Clare in terms such as my feelings suggested.
About a week or two afterward I met him on the road between Imola and
Bologna, after an interval of seven or eight years. He was abroad in
1814, and came home just as I set out in 1816.

"This meeting annihilated for a moment all the years between the present
time and the days of Harrow. It was a new and inexplicable feeling, like
rising from the grave, to me. Clare, too, was much agitated--more in
appearance than I was myself; for I could feel his heart beat to his
fingers' ends, unless, indeed, it was the pulse of my own which made me
think so. He told me, that I should find a note from him left at
Bologna. I did. We were obliged to part for our different journeys--he
for Rome, I for Pisa--but with the promise to meet again in the spring.
We were but five minutes together, and on the public road; but I hardly
recollect an hour of my existence which could be weighed against those
few minutes.... Of all I have ever known he has always been the least
altered in every thing from the excellent qualities and kind affections
which attached me to him so strongly at school. I should hardly have
thought it possible for society to leave a being with so little of the
leaven of bad passions.

"I do not speak from personal experience only, but from all I have ever
heard of him from others during absence and distance."

"My greatest friend, Lord Clare, is at Rome," he wrote to Moore from
Pisa, in March, 1822: "we met on the road, and our meeting was quite
sentimental--really pathetic on both sides. I have always loved him
better than any male thing in the world."

In June Lord Clare came to visit Byron, and on the 8th of that month
Byron wrote to Moore:--

"A few