Since my
arrival here. I have had scarcely any other companion. I have found
her very pretty, very accomplished, and extremely eccentric.
Buonaparte is even now so incensed against her, that her life would be
in some danger if she were taken prisoner a second time."
The tone in which he addresses this fair heroine in Childe Harold is
(consistently with the above dispassionate account of her) that of the
purest admiration and interest, unwarmed by any more ardent
sentiment:--
"Sweet Florence! could another ever share
This wayward, loveless heart, it would be thine:
But, check'd by every tie, I may not dare
To cast a worthless offering at thy shrine,
Nor ask so dear a breast to feel one pang for mine.
"Thus Harold deem'd as on that lady's eye
He look'd, and met its beam without a thought,
Save admiration, glancing harmless by," &c. &c.
In one so imaginative as Lord Byron, who, while he infused so much of
his life into his poetry, mingled also not a little of poetry with his
life, it is difficult, in unravelling the texture of his feelings, to
distinguish at all times between the fanciful and the real. His
description here, for instance, of the unmoved and "loveless heart,"
with which he contemplated even the charms of this attractive person,
is wholly at variance, not only with the anecdote from his "Memoranda"
which I have recalled, but with the statements in many of his
subsequent letters, and, above all, with one of the most graceful of
his lesser poems, purporting to be addressed to this same lady during
a thunder-storm, on his road to Zitza.
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