The poem copied by her, however, has a sad meaning, which she afterwards learned to understand only too well:—­

   ’There’s not a joy the world can give like that it takes away
   When the glow of early thought declines in feeling’s dull decay: 
   ’Tis not on youth’s smooth cheek the blush alone that fades so fast;
   But the tender bloom of heart is gone e’er youth itself be past. 
   Then the few whose spirits float above the wreck of happiness
   Are driven o’er the shoals of guilt, or ocean of excess: 
   The magnet of their course is gone, or only points in vain
   The shore to which their shivered sail shall never stretch again.’

Only a few days before she left him for ever, Lord Byron sent Murray manuscripts, in Lady Byron’s handwriting, of the ‘Siege of Corinth,’ and ‘Parisina,’ and wrote,—­

’I am very glad that the handwriting was a favourable omen of the morale of the piece:  but you must not trust to that; for my copyist would write out anything I desired, in all the ignorance of innocence.’

There were lucid intervals in which Lord Byron felt the charm of his wife’s mind, and the strength of her powers.  ’Bell, you could be a poet too, if you only thought so,’ he would say.  There were summer-hours in her stormy life, the memory of which never left her, when Byron was as gentle and tender as he was beautiful; when he seemed to be possessed by a good angel:  and then for a little time all the ideal possibilities of his nature stood revealed.

The most dreadful men to live with are those who thus alternate between angel and devil.  The buds of hope and love called out by a day or two of sunshine are frozen again and again, till the tree is killed.

But there came an hour of revelation,—­an hour when, in a manner which left no kind of room for doubt, Lady Byron saw the full depth of the abyss of infamy which her marriage was expected to cover, and understood that she was expected to be the cloak and the accomplice of this infamy.

Many women would have been utterly crushed by such a disclosure; some would have fled from him immediately, and exposed and denounced the crime.  Lady Byron did neither.  When all the hope of womanhood died out of her heart, there arose within her, stronger, purer, and brighter, that immortal kind of love such as God feels for the sinner,—­the love of which Jesus spoke, and which holds the one wanderer of more account than the ninety and nine that went not astray.  She would neither leave her husband nor betray him, nor yet would she for one moment justify his sin; and hence came two years of convulsive struggle, in which sometimes, for a while, the good angel seemed to gain ground, and then the evil one returned with sevenfold vehemence.

Lord Byron argued his case with himself and with her with all the sophistries of his powerful mind.  He repudiated Christianity as authority; asserted the right of every human being to follow out what he called ‘the impulses of nature.’  Subsequently he introduced into one of his dramas the reasoning by which he justified himself in incest.