--Believe me, with
that deference which I have always from my childhood paid to your
_talents_, and with somewhat a better opinion of your heart than I
have hitherto entertained,
"Yours ever," &c.
Among the causes--if not rather among the results--of that disposition
to melancholy, which, after all, perhaps, naturally belonged to his
temperament, must not be forgotten those sceptical views of religion,
which clouded, as has been shown, his boyish thoughts, and, at the
time of which I am speaking, gathered still more darkly over his mind.
In general we find the young too ardently occupied with the
enjoyments which this life gives or promises to afford either leisure
or inclination for much enquiry into the mysteries of the next. But
with him it was unluckily otherwise; and to have, at once, anticipated
the worst experience both of the voluptuary and the reasoner,--to have
reached, as he supposed, the boundary of this world's pleasures, and
see nothing but "clouds and darkness" beyond, was the doom, the
anomalous doom, which a nature, premature in all its passions and
powers, inflicted on Lord Byron.
When Pope, at the age of five-and-twenty, complained of being weary of
the world, he was told by Swift that he "had not yet acted or suffered
enough in the world to have become weary of it."[111] But far
different was the youth of Pope and of Byron;--what the former but
anticipated in thought, the latter had drunk deep of in reality;--at
an age when the one was but looking forth on the sea of life, the
other had plunged in, and tried its depths.
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