Before leaving Harrow the poet had passed through the experience of a passion of another kind, with a result that unhappily coloured his life.  Accounts differ as to his first meeting with Mary Ann Chaworth, the heiress of the family whose estates adjoined his own, and daughter of the race that had held with his such varied relations.  In one of his letters ho dates the introduction previous to his trip to Cheltenham, but it seems not to have ripened into intimacy till a later period.  Byron, who had, in the autumn of 1802, visited his mother at Bath, joined in a masquerade there and attracted attention by the liveliness of his manners.  In the following year Mrs. Byron again settled at Nottingham, and in the course of a second and longer visit to her he frequently passed the night at the Abbey, of which Lord Grey de Ruthyn was then a temporary tenant.  This was the occasion of his renewing his acquaintance with the Chaworths, who invited him to their seat at Annesley.  He used at first to return every evening to Newstead, giving the excuse that the family pictures would come down and take revenge on him for his grand-uncle’s deed, a fancy repeated in the Siege of Corinth.  Latterly he consented to stay at Annesley, which thus became his headquarters during the remainder of the holidays of 1803.  The rest of the six weeks were mainly consumed in an excursion to Matlock and Castleton, in the same companionship.  This short period, with the exception of prologue and epilogue, embraced the whole story of his first real love.  Byron was on this occasion in earnest; he wished to marry Miss Chaworth, an event which, he says, would have “joined broad lands, healed an old feud, and satisfied at least one heart.”

The intensity of his passion is suggestively brought before us in an account of his crossing the Styx of the Peak cavern, alone with the lady and the Charon of the boat.  In the same passage he informs us that he had never told his love; but that she had discovered—­it is obvious that she never returned—­it.  We have another vivid picture of his irritation when she was waltzing in his presence at Matlock; then an account of their riding together in the country on their return to the family residence; again, of his bending over the piano as she was playing the Welsh air of “Mary Anne;” and lastly, of his overhearing her heartless speech to her maid, which first opened his eyes to the real state of affairs—­“Do you think I could care for that lame boy?”—­upon which he rushed out of the house, and ran, like a hunted creature, to Newstead.  Thence he shortly returned from the rougher school of life to his haunts and tasks at Harrow.  A year later the pair again met to take farewell, on the hill of Annesley—­an incident he has commemorated in two short stanzas, that have the sound of a wind moaning over a moor.  “I suppose,” he said, “the next time I see you, you will be Mrs. Chaworth?” “I hope so,” she replied (her betrothed, Mr. Musters,