But, in the case of Lord
Byron, disappointment met him on the very threshold of life. His
mother, to whom his affections first, naturally with ardour, turned,
either repelled them rudely, or capriciously trifled with them. In
speaking of his early days to a friend at Genoa, a short time before
his departure for Greece, he traced the first feelings of pain and
humiliation he had ever known to the coldness with which his mother
had received his caresses in infancy, and the frequent taunts on his
personal deformity with which she had wounded him.
The sympathy of a sister's love, of all the influences on the mind of a
youth the most softening, was also, in his early days, denied to him,--his
sister Augusta and he having seen but little of each other while young. A
vent through the calm channel of domestic affections might have brought
down the high current of his feelings to a level nearer that of the world
he had to traverse, and thus saved them from the tumultuous rapids and
falls to which this early elevation, in their after-course, exposed them.
In the dearth of all home-endearments, his heart had no other resource but
in those boyish friendships which he formed at school; and when these were
interrupted by his removal to Cambridge, he was again thrown back,
isolated, on his own restless desires. Then followed his ill-fated
attachment to Miss Chaworth, to which, more than to any other cause, he
himself attributed the desolating change then wrought in his disposition.
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