"January 5. 1816.
"I hope Mrs. M. is quite re-established. The little girl was born
on the 10th of December last; her name is Augusta _Ada_ (the second
a very antique family name,--I believe not used since the reign of
King John). She was, and is, very flourishing and fat, and reckoned
very large for her days--squalls and sucks incessantly. Are you
answered? Her mother is doing very well, and up again.
"I have now been married a year on the second of this
month--heigh-ho! I have seen nobody lately much worth noting,
except S * * and another general of the Gauls, once or twice at
dinners out of doors. S * * is a fine, foreign, villanous-looking,
intelligent, and very agreeable man; his compatriot is more of the
_petit-maître_, and younger, but I should think not at all of the
same intellectual calibre with the Corsican--which S * *, you know,
is, and a cousin of Napoleon's.
"Are you never to be expected in town again? To be sure, there is
no one here of the 1500 fillers of hot-rooms, called the
fashionable world. My approaching papa-ship detained us for advice,
&c. &c. though I would as soon be here as any where else on this
side of the Straits of Gibraltar.
"I would gladly--or, rather, sorrowfully--comply with your request
of a dirge for the poor girl you mention.[90] But how can I write
on one I have never seen or known? Besides, you will do it much
better yourself. I could not write upon any thing, without some
personal experience and foundation; far less on a theme so
peculiar. Now, you have both in this case; and, if you had neither,
you have more imagination, and would never fail.
"This is but a dull scrawl, and I am but a dull fellow. Just at
present, I am absorbed in 500 contradictory contemplations, though
with but one object in view--which will probably end in nothing, as
most things we wish do. But never mind,--as somebody says, 'for the
blue sky bends over all.' I only could be glad, if it bent over me
where it is a little bluer; like the 'skyish top of blue Olympus,'
which, by the way, looked very white when I last saw it.
"Ever," &c.
[Footnote 90: I had mentioned to him, as a subject worthy of his best
powers of pathos, a melancholy event which had just occurred in my
neighbourhood, and to which I have myself made allusion in one of the
Sacred Melodies--"Weep not for her."]
* * * * *
On reading over the foregoing letter, I was much struck by the tone of
melancholy that pervaded it; and well knowing it to be the habit of the
writer's mind to seek relief, when under the pressure of any disquiet
or disgust, in that sense of freedom which told him that there were
homes for him elsewhere, I could perceive, I thought, in his
recollections of the "blue Olympus," some return of the restless and
roving spirit, which unhappiness or impatience always called up in his
mind. I had, indeed, at the time when he sent me those melancholy
verses, "There's not a joy this world can give," &c. felt some vague
apprehensions as to the mood into which his spirits then seemed to be
sinking, and, in acknowledging the receipt of the verses, thus tried to
banter him out of it:--"But why thus on your stool of melancholy again,
Master Stephen?--This will never do--it plays the deuce with all the
matter-of-fact duties of life, and you must bid adieu to it. Youth is
the only time when one can be melancholy with impunity. As life itself
grows sad and serious we have nothing for it but--to be as much as
possible the contrary."
My absence from London during the whole of this year had deprived me of
all opportunities of judging for myself how far the appearances of his
domestic state gave promise of happiness; nor had any rumours reached me
which at all inclined me to suspect that the course of his married life
hitherto exhibited less smoothness than such unions,--on the surface, at
least,--generally wear. The strong and affectionate terms in which, soon
after the marriage, he had, in some of the letters I have given,
declared his own happiness--a declaration which his known frankness left
me no room to question--had, in no small degree, tended to still those
apprehensions which my first view of the lot he had chosen for himself
awakened. I could not, however, but observe that these indications of a
contented heart soon ceased. His mention of the partner of his home
became more rare and formal, and there was observable, I thought,
through some of his letters a feeling of unquiet and weariness that
brought back all those gloomy anticipations with which I had, from the
first, regarded his fate. This last letter of his, in particular, struck
me as full of sad omen, and, in the course of my answer, I thus noticed
to him the impression it had made on me:--"And so you are a whole year
married!--
'It was last year I vow'd to thee
That fond impossibility.'
Do you know, my dear B., there was a something in your last letter--a
sort of unquiet mystery, as well as a want of your usual elasticity of
spirits--which has hung upon my mind unpleasantly ever since. I long to
be near you, that I might know how you really look and feel; for these
letters tell nothing, and one word, _a quattr'occhi_, is worth whole
reams of correspondence. But only _do_ tell me you are happier than that
letter has led me to fear, and I shall be satisfied."
* * * * *
It was in a few weeks after this latter communication between us that
Lady Byron adopted the resolution of parting from him. She had left
London about the middle of January, on a visit to her father's house, in
Leicestershire, and Lord Byron was, in a short time after, to follow
her. They had parted in the utmost kindness,--she wrote him a letter,
full of playfulness and affection, on the road, and, immediately on her
arrival at Kirkby Mallory, her father wrote to acquaint Lord Byron that
she would return to him no more. At the time when he had to stand this
unexpected shock, his pecuniary embarrassments, which had been fast
gathering around him during the whole of the last year (there having
been no less than eight or nine executions in his house within that
period), had arrived at their utmost; and at a moment when, to use his
own strong expressions, he was "standing alone on his hearth, with his
household gods shivered around him," he was also doomed to receive the
startling intelligence that the wife who had just parted with him in
kindness, had parted with him--for ever.