had never dreamed.  On such subjects, and on poetry, their conversation generally turned; and, as might be expected, from Lord Byron’s facility in receiving new impressions, the opinions of his companion were not altogether without some influence on his mind.  Here and there, among those fine bursts of passion and description that abound in the third Canto of Childe Harold, may be discovered traces of that mysticism of meaning,—­that sublimity, losing itself in its own vagueness,—­which so much characterised the writings of his extraordinary friend; and in one of the notes we find Shelley’s favourite Pantheism of Love thus glanced at:—­“But this is not all:  the feeling with which all around Clarens and the opposite rocks of Meillerie is invested, is of a still higher and more comprehensive order than the mere sympathy with individual passion; it is a sense of the existence of love in its most extended and sublime capacity, and of our own participation of its good and of its glory:  it is the great principle of the universe, which is there more condensed, but not less manifested; and of which, though knowing ourselves a part, we lose our individuality, and mingle in the beauty of the whole.”

Another proof of the ductility with which he fell into his new friend’s tastes and predilections, appears in the tinge, if not something deeper, of the manner and cast of thinking of Mr. Wordsworth, which is traceable through so many of his most beautiful stanzas.  Being naturally, from his love of the abstract and imaginative, an admirer of the great poet of the Lakes, Mr. Shelley omitted no opportunity of bringing the beauties of his favourite writer under the notice of Lord Byron; and it is not surprising that, once persuaded into a fair perusal, the mind of the noble poet should—­in spite of some personal and political prejudices which unluckily survived this short access of admiration—­not only feel the influence but, in some degree, even reflect the hues of one of the very few real and original poets that this age (fertile as it is in rhymers quales ego et Cluvienus) has had the glory of producing.

When Polidori was of their party, (which, till he found attractions elsewhere, was generally the case,) their more elevated subjects of conversation were almost always put to flight by the strange sallies of this eccentric young man, whose vanity made him a constant butt for Lord Byron’s sarcasm and merriment.  The son of a highly respectable Italian gentleman, who was in early life, I understand, the secretary of Alfieri, Polidori seems to have possessed both talents and dispositions which, had he lived, might have rendered him a useful member of his profession and of society.  At the time, however, of which we are speaking, his ambition of distinction far outwent both his powers and opportunities of attaining it.  His mind, accordingly, between ardour and weakness, was kept in a constant hectic of vanity, and he seems to have alternately provoked and amused his noble