-most strange in one so young!"
* * * * * * *
"High, yet resembling not his lost Haidee;
Yet each was radiant in her proper sphere."
* * * * * * *
"The difference in them
Was such as lies between a flower and gem."

"_Don Juan_," canto xv.

Now that we have seen Lord Byron's ideal of womankind, let us mark with
what sentiments they inspired him, and in what way love always presented
itself to his heart or his imagination. Ever dealing out toward him the
same measure of justice and truth, people have gone on complacently
repeating that his love sometimes became a very frenzy, or anon
degenerated into a sensation rather than a sentiment. And his poetry has
been asserted to contain proof of this in the actions, characters, and
words of the persons there portrayed. I think, then, that the best way
of ascertaining the degree of truth belonging to these asseverations, is
to let him speak himself, on this sentiment, at all the different
periods of his life:--

"Yes, Love indeed is light from heaven;
A spark of that immortal fire
With angels shared, by Allah given
To lift from earth our low desire.
Devotion wafts the mind above,
But Heaven itself descends in love;
A feeling from the Godhead caught,
To wean from self each sordid thought;
A Ray of Him who form'd the whole;
A Glory circling round the soul!
I grant _my_ love imperfect, all
That mortals by the name miscall;
Then deem it evil, what thou wilt;
But say, oh say, _hers_ was not guilt!
She was my life's unerring light:
That quench'd, what beam shall break my night?"
"_The Giaour._"

In 1817, at Venice, when his heart, at twenty-nine years of age, was
devoid of any real love, and had even arrived at never loving, although
suffering deeply from the void thus created, Lord Byron giving vent to
his feelings wrote thus:--

"Oh! that the Desert were my dwelling-place,
With one fair Spirit for my minister,
That I might all forget the human race,
And, hating no one, love but only her!
Ye elements!--in whose ennobling stir
I feel myself exalted--Can ye not
Accord me such a being? Do I err
In deeming such inhabit many a spot?
Though with them to converse can rarely be our lot."[49]

At the same period, he also unveils his soul, in guessing that of
Tasso:--

"An