enings he passed at his friend Kinnaird's house (some months
before his marriage, the last of his London life), when Moore would sing
his favorite songs, bringing tears to Byron's eyes. And it was this same
taste that subsequently drew him to the piano at which Madame G---- sat,
at Ravenna, Pisa, Genoa; and which, when she played or sung Mozart's and
Rossini's favorite motets, made him say that he no longer loved any
other music but hers.

What he had once loved never tired him. Memory was to him like an
enchanter's wand, throwing some charm into objects which in themselves
possessed none. He loved the land where he had loved, however naturally
unattractive it might be: witness Ravenna, and Italy in general.

"Possession of what I truly love," said he, in the very rare moments
when he did himself justice "does not cloy me." He loved the mountains
of Greece, because they recalled those of Scotland; he would have loved
other mountains, because they recalled those of Greece.

A few months before his death, he said in his charming poem "The
Island,"--

"Long have I roam'd through lands which are not mine,
Adored the Alp, and loved the Apennine,
Revered Parnassus, and beheld the steep
Jove's Ida and Olympus crown the deep:
But 'twas not all long ages' lore, nor all
_Their_ nature held me in their thrilling thrall;
The infant rapture still survived the boy,
And Loch-na-gar with Ida look'd o'er Troy,
Mix'd Celtic memories with the Phrygian mount,
And Highland linns with Castalie's clear fount.
Forgive me, Homer's universal shade!
Forgive me, Phoebus! that my fancy stray'd;
The north and nature taught me to adore
Your scenes sublime, from those beloved before."[75]

He would love a place of abode because he had loved when in it. The same
with regard to a dwelling, a walk, a melody, a perfume, a form, and even
a dish; he who cared so little for any sort of food. His childish
impressions, his readings at that age, had a great deal to do with his
choice of poetic subjects afterward; and we find them again reproduced
even in his last dramatic work. "Werner," written in such a fine moral
sense, is the result of the "Canterbury Tale" read in childhood. Never
was man more constant in his habits and tastes than he; and, indeed, it
required that indefinable charm of soul he possessed, and which pervaded
his whole being, to prevent monotony from perverting this quality into a
fault.

Why, then, have