My Recollections of Lord Byron
Here might I sleep where all my hopes arose;
Scene of my youth, and couch of my repose;
Forever stretch'd beneath this mantling shade,
Press'd by the turf where once my childhood play'd;
Wrapt by the soil that veils the spot I loved,
Mix'd with the earth o'er which my footsteps moved;
Blest by the tongues that charm'd my youthful ear,
Mourn'd by the few my soul acknowledged here;
Deplored by those in early days allied,
And unremember'd by the world beside.
"But although he may for a time," says Moore, "have experienced this
kind of moral atomy, it was not in his nature to be long without
attaching himself to somebody, and the friendship which he conceived for
Eddleston--a man younger than himself, and not at all of his rank in
society--even surpassed in ardor all the other attachments of his
youth."
EDDLESTON
was one of the choristers at Cambridge. His talent for music attracted
Byron's attention. When he lost the society of Long, who had been his
sole comfort at Cambridge, he took very much to the company of young
Eddleston. One feels how much he was attached to him, on reading those
lines in which he thanks Eddleston for a cornelian heart he had sent
him:--
THE CORNELIAN.
No specious splendor of this stone
Endears it to my memory ever;
With lustre only once it shone,
And blushes modest as the giver.
Some, who can sneer at friendship's ties,
Have for my weakness oft reproved me;
Yet still the simple gift I prize,
For I am sure the giver loved me.
He offer'd it with downcast look,
As fearful that I might refuse it;
I told him, when the gift I took,
My only fear should be to lose it.
When Eddleston left college, Lord Byron wrote to Miss Pigott a letter
full of regret at having lost his youthful friend, and thanking her for
having taken an interest in him.
"During the whole time we were at Cambridge together," says Byron, "we
saw each other every day, summer and winter, and never once found a
moment of _ennui_, but parted each day with greater regret. I trust," he
added, at the end of his letter, "that you will some day see us
together; that is the being I esteem most, though I love several
others."
But in the year 1811 Eddleston died of consumption; and Lord Byron wrote
to Miss Pigott's mother, to beg of her to return the cornelian heart
which he had intrusted to her care, because it had "now acquired a value
which he wished it had never had;" the original donor having died at the
age of twenty-one, a few months before, and being "the sixth in the
space of four months of a series of friends and relations whom he had
lost since May."
The cornelian heart was restored, and Byron was informed that he had
only intrusted it, but not given it to Miss Pigott. It was on learning
of Eddleston's death that Byron added the touching ninth stanza to the
second canto of "Childe Harold."
After speaking of the hope of meeting again in a celestial abode, those
whom he loved on earth, and all those who taught the truth, he
exclaims,--
"There, thou!--whose love and life together fled,
Have left me here to love and live in vain--
Twined with my heart, and can I deem thee dead
When busy Memory flashes on my brain?
Well--I will dream that we may meet again,
And woo the vision to my vacant breast:
If aught of young Remembrance then remain,
Be as it may Futurity's behest,
For me 'twere bliss enough to know thy spirit blest!"
Among the children younger than himself of whom he established himself
the protector, one of those he loved best was his fag William Harness.
HARNESS.
The Rev. William Harness is the author of the work entitled the
"Relations between Christianity and Happiness, by one of the oldest and
most esteemed friends of Lord Byron."
Harness was four years younger than Byron, and one of the earliest
friends he made at Harrow. Lord Byron had not been long at the school,
and had not yet formed any friendship with other boys, when he saw a
boy, "still lame from an accident of his childhood, and but just
recovered from a severe illness, bullied by a boy much older and
stronger than himself." Byron interfered and took his part.
"We both seem perfectly to recollect," says he, "with a mixture of
pleasure and regret, the hours we once passed together; and I assure
you, most sincerely, they are numbered among the happiest of my brief
chronicle of enjoyment. I am now getting into years, that is to say, I
was twenty a month ago, and another year will send me into the world, to
run my career of folly with the rest. I was then just fourteen--you were
almost the first of my Harrow friends, certainly the first in my esteem,
if not in date; but an absence from Harrow for some time shortly after,
and new connections on your side, and the difference in our conduct,
from that turbulent and riotous disposition of mine which impelled me
into every species of mischief, all these circumstances combined to
destroy our intimacy, which affection urged me to continue, and Memory
compels me to regret. But there is not a circumstance attending that
period, hardly a sentence we exchanged, which is not impressed on my
mind at this moment.
"There is another circumstance you do not know:--the first lines I ever
attempted at Harrow were addressed to you; but as on our return from the
holidays we were strangers, the lines were destroyed.
"I have dwelt longer on this theme than I intended, and I shall now
conclude with what I ought to have begun. Will you sometimes write to
me? I do not ask it often, and, if we meet, let us be what we should be,
and what we were."
Young Harness, gifted with a calm and mild temperament, was being
educated for the Church. Besides being always at Harrow, and four years
younger than Byron, the life which the latter led at Newstead and at
Cambridge did not suit one destined to a career which requires greater
severity of demeanor. But the two friends corresponded, and Lord Byron
sent him one of his early copies of "Hours of Idleness." In the letter
which the Rev. W. Harness wrote to Moore, after Byron's death, to tell
him the nature of the quarrel which he and Byron had had together, and
their subsequent reconciliation, he ends by saying:--
"Our conversation was renewed and continued from that time till his
going abroad. Whatever faults Lord Byron may have exhibited toward
others, to myself he was always uniformly affectionate.... I can not
call to mind a single instance of caprice or unkindness in the whole
course of our intimacy to allege against him."
The fault to which Harness alludes, and which he acknowledges, was one
of the kind to which Byron was most sensitive, namely, coldness. Having
lost some of his early and best friends, Edward Long, and all the others
being spread far and near, abroad and in England, following out their
respective careers and destiny, Harness was about the only early friend
he had near him.
The time was approaching when he was going to leave England, to travel
and to learn by study the great book of Nature. His heart was wounded by
the injustice which had been done him, by the many disenchantments which
he had experienced, by the brutal criticism of his "Hours of Idleness"
from the pen of his relation Lord Carlisle, and by his money
difficulties. Unable as yet to foretell the effects of his satire, which
had not yet appeared, and the success of which might have consoled him a
little for past mortifications, he found in friendship his sole relief,
and particularly in the friendship of Harness. At this very critical
time, Harness--(be it either through the influence of his family and
relations, or through a notion that his principles were rather unsuited
to the heterodox opinions of Lord Byron)--behaved coldly toward Byron.
Dallas, however, who from puritanism and family pride, and even from
jealousy, was rather an enemy of Lord Byron's intellectual
friends--(contending that it was they who had instilled into Byron all
the anti-orthodox views which the poet had adopted)--makes an exception
in favor of Harness.
Byron spoke of Harness with an affection which he hoped was repaid to
him. I often met him at Newstead, and both he and Byron had had their
portraits taken, which they were to make a present of to one another. It
was not until some unknown cause sprung up to establish a coldness
between the two friends that their intimacy ceased, and at the same time
Harness's visits to Newstead. Byron felt it very keenly.
In what degree the conduct of Harness hurt Lord Byron and contributed to
those explosions of misanthropy which, slight and passing as they were,
have nevertheless been urged as a reproach against his first and second
cantos of "Childe Harold," I shall examine later.
Here it is only necessary to say that in a soul such as his, where
rancor could never live, such a coldness wounded him without altering
his sentiments in any way. After two years' absence he returned to
England, and so heartily forgave Harness that he actually wished to
dedicate to him the first two cantos of "Childe Harold," and only gave
up this idea from a generous fear that its dedication might injure him
in his clerical profession, on account of certain stanzas in the poem
which were not quite orthodox.
"The letter," says Moore, "in which he expresses these delicate
sentiments is, unfortunately, lost."
Some months after his return to England he resumed his correspondence
with Harness, and both the friends assembled at Newstead. Harness,
however, as a clergyman, was severe in his judgments. Byron wrote to
him:--
"You are censorious, child: when you are a little older, you will learn
to dislike every body, but abuse nobody.... I thank you most truly for
the concluding part of your letter. I have been of late not much
accustomed to kindness from any quarter, and I am not the less pleased
to meet with it again from one to whom I had known it earliest. I have
not changed in all my ramblings; Harrow, and of course yourself, never
left me, and the
'Dulces reminiscitur Argos.'
attended me to the very spot to which that sentence alludes in the mind
of the fallen Argive. Our intimacy began before we began to date at all,
and it rests with you to continue it till the hour which must number it
and me with the things that were."
Two days afterward, he writes to him again a letter full of endearing
expressions, couched in a friendly tone of interest, of which the
following extracts are instances:--
"And now, child, what art thou doing? Reading, I trust. I want to see
you take a degree. Remember, this is the most important period of your
life; and don't disappoint your papa and your aunt and all your kin,
besides myself.
"You see, _mio carissimo_, what a pestilent correspondent I am likely to
become; but then you shall be as quiet at Newstead as you please, and I
won't disturb your studies as I do now."
On the 11th of December, of the same year, he invites Moore to Newstead
and says, "H---- will be here, and a young friend named Harness, the
earliest and dearest I ever had from the third form at Harrow to this
hour."
And, finally, he wrote to Harness that he had no greater pleasure than
to hear from him; indeed, that it was more than a pleasure.
HIS LATER FRIENDS.
When he had reached his nineteenth year, which was the second of his
stay at Cambridge, Byron (having lost sight of most of his Harrow
friends to whom he dedicated his verses, and having lost both Long and
Eddleston) suddenly found himself launched into the vortex of a
university life, for which he had no liking. Happily, however, he was
thrown among young men of great distinction, whom fate had then gathered
at Cambridge.