“From the wreck of the past, which hath perish’d,
      Thus much I at least may recall,
    It hath taught me that what I most cherish’d
      Deserved to be dearest of all: 
    In the desert a fountain is springing,
      In the wide waste there still is a tree,
    And a bird in the solitude singing,
      Which speaks to my spirit of thee.

On a scrap of paper, in his handwriting, dated April 14. 1816, I find the following list of his attendants, with an annexed outline of his projected tour:—­“Servants, ——­ Berger, a Swiss, William Fletcher, and Robert Rushton.—­John William Polidori, M.D.—­Switzerland, Flanders, Italy, and (perhaps) France.”  The two English servants, it will be observed, were the same “yeoman” and “page” who had set out with him on his youthful travels in 1809; and now,—­for the second and last time taking leave of his country,—­on the 25th of April he sailed for Ostend.

The circumstances under which Lord Byron now took leave of England were such as, in the case of any ordinary person, could not be considered otherwise than disastrous and humiliating.  He had, in the course of one short year, gone through every variety of domestic misery;—­had seen his hearth eight or nine times profaned by the visitations of the law, and been only saved from a prison by the privileges of his rank.  He had alienated, as far as they had ever been his, the affections of his wife; and now, rejected by her, and condemned by the world, was betaking himself to an exile which had not even the dignity of appearing voluntary, as the excommunicating voice of society seemed to leave him no other resource.  Had he been of that class of unfeeling and self-satisfied natures from whose hard surface the reproaches of others fall pointless, he might have found in insensibility a sure refuge against reproach; but, on the contrary, the same sensitiveness that kept him so awake to the applauses of mankind, rendered him, in a still more intense degree, alive to their censure.  Even the strange, perverse pleasure which he felt in painting himself unamiably to the world did not prevent him from being both startled and pained when the world took him at his word; and, like a child in a mask before a looking-glass, the dark semblance which he had, half in sport, put on, when reflected back upon him from the mirror of public opinion, shocked even himself.

Thus surrounded by vexations, and thus deeply feeling them, it is not too much to say, that any other spirit but his own would have sunk under the struggle, and lost, perhaps irrecoverably, that level of self-esteem which alone affords a stand against the shocks of fortune.  But in him,—­furnished as was his mind with reserves of strength, waiting to be called out,—­the very intensity of the pressure brought relief by the proportionate re-action which it produced.  Had his transgressions and frailties been visited with no more than their due portion of punishment, there