There was, therefore, on their present meeting at Geneva, no want of disposition towards acquaintance on either side, and an intimacy almost immediately sprung up between them.  Among the tastes common to both, that for boating was not the least strong; and in this beautiful region they had more than ordinary temptations to indulge in it.  Every evening, during their residence under the same roof at Secheron, they embarked, accompanied by the ladies and Polidori, on the Lake; and to the feelings and fancies inspired by these excursions, which were not unfrequently prolonged into the hours of moonlight, we are indebted for some of those enchanting stanzas[116] in which the poet has given way to his passionate love of Nature so fervidly.

“There breathes a living fragrance from the shore
Of flowers yet fresh with childhood; on the ear
Drips the light drop of the suspended oar.
* * * * *
At intervals, some bird from out the brakes
Starts into voice a moment, then is still. 
There seems a floating whisper on the hill,
But that is fancy,—­for the starlight dews
All silently their tears of love instil,
Weeping themselves away.”

A person who was of these parties has thus described to me one of their evenings:—­“When the bise or north-east wind blows, the waters of the Lake are driven towards the town, and with the stream of the Rhone, which sets strongly in the same direction, combine to make a very rapid current towards the harbour.  Carelessly, one evening, we had yielded to its course, till we found ourselves almost driven on the piles; and it required all our rowers’ strength to master the tide.  The waves were high and inspiriting—­we were all animated by our contest with the elements.  ‘I will sing you an Albanian song,’ cried Lord Byron; ’now, be sentimental and give me all your attention.’  It was a strange, wild howl that he gave forth; but such as, he declared, was an exact imitation of the savage Albanian mode,—­laughing, the while, at our disappointment, who had expected a wild Eastern melody.”

Sometimes the party landed, for a walk upon the shore, and, on such occasions, Lord Byron would loiter behind the rest, lazily trailing his sword-stick along, and moulding, as he went, his thronging thoughts into shape.  Often too, when in the boat, he would lean abstractedly over the side, and surrender himself up, in silence, to the same absorbing task.

The conversation of Mr. Shelley, from the extent of his poetic reading, and the strange, mystic speculations into which his system of philosophy led him, was of a nature strongly to arrest and interest the attention of Lord Byron, and to turn him away from worldly associations and topics into more abstract and untrodden ways of thought.  As far as contrast, indeed, is an enlivening ingredient of such intercourse, it would be difficult to find two persons more formed to whet each other’s faculties by discussion, as on few points of common interest between them did their opinions agree; and that this difference had its root deep in the conformation of their respective minds needs but a glance through the rich, glittering labyrinth of Mr. Shelley’s pages to assure us.