she should not marry an Englishman, is here explained and justified), she might, and may, marry very respectably.  In England such a dowry would be a pittance, while elsewhere it is a fortune.  It is, besides, my wish that she should be a Roman Catholic, which I look upon as the best religion, as it is assuredly the oldest of the various branches of Christianity.”  It only remains to add that, when he heard that the child had fallen ill of fever in 1822, Byron was almost speechless with agitation, and, on the news of her death, which took place April 22nd, he seemed at first utterly prostrated.  Next day he said, “Allegra is dead; she is more fortunate than we.  It is God’s will, let us mention it no more.”  Her remains rest beneath the elm-tree at Harrow which her father used to haunt in boyhood, with the date of birth and death, and the scripture—­

  I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me.

The most interesting of the visits paid to Byron during the period of his life at Venice was that of Shelley, who, leaving his wife and children at Bagni di Lucca, came to see him in August, 1818.  He arrived late, in the midst of a thunderstorm; and next day they sailed to the Lido, and rode together along the sands.  The attitude of the two poets towards each other is curious; the comparatively shrewd man of the world often relied on the idealist for guidance and help in practical matters, admired his courage and independence, spoke of him invariably as the best of men, but never paid a sufficiently warm tribute in public to his work.  Shelley, on the other hand, certainly the most modest of great poets, contemplates Byron in the fixed attitude of a literary worshipper.

The introduction to Julian and Maddalo, directly suggested by this visit, under the slight veil of a change in the name, gives a summary of the view of his friend’s character which he continued to entertain.  “He is a person of the most consummate genius, and capable if he would direct his energies to such an end, of becoming the redeemer of his degraded country.  But it is his weakness to be proud; he derives, from a comparison of his own extraordinary mind with the dwarfish intellects that surround him, an intense apprehension of the nothingness of human life.  His passions and his powers are incomparably greater than those of other men; and instead of the latter having been employed in curbing the former, they have mutually lent each other strength;” but “in social life no human being can be more gentle, patient, and unassuming.  He is cheerful, frank, and witty.  His more serious conversation is a sort of intoxication; men are held by it as by a spell.”

Subsequently to this visit Byron lent the villa at Este to his friend, and during the autumn weeks of their residence there were written the lines among the Euganean hills, where, in the same strain of reverence, Shelley refers to the “tempest-cleaving swan of Albion,” to the “music flung o’er a mighty thunder-fit,” and to the sunlike soul destined to immortalize his ocean refuge,—­