Who did not love her better:—in her home,
A thousand leagues from his,—her native home,
She dwelt, begirt with growing Infancy,130
Daughters and sons of Beauty,—but behold!
Upon her face there was the tint of grief,
The settled shadow of an inward strife,
And an unquiet drooping of the eye,
As if its lid were charged with unshed tears.[1]
What could her grief be?—she had all she loved,
And he who had so loved her was not there
To trouble with bad hopes, or evil wish,
Or ill-repressed affliction, her pure thoughts.
What could her grief be?—she had loved him not,140
Nor given him cause to deem himself beloved,
Nor could he be a part of that which preyed
Upon her mind—a spectre of the past.
VI.
A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
The Wanderer was returned.—I saw him stand
Before an Altar—with a gentle bride;
Her face was fair, but was not that which made
The Starlight[2] of his Boyhood;—as he stood
Even at the altar, o'er his brow there came
- ↑ [Compare—
"Then Cythna turned to me and from her eyes
Which swam with unshed tears," etc.Shelley's Revolt of Islam ("Laon and Cythna"),
Canto XII. stanza xxii. lines 2, 3. Poetical Works, 1829, p. 48.]
- ↑ [An old servant of the Chaworth family, Mary Marsden, told Washington Irving (Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey, 1835, p. 204) that Byron used to call Mary Chaworth "his bright morning star of Annesley." Compare the well-known lines—
"She was a form of Life and Light.
That, seen, became a part of sight;
And rose, where'er I turned mine eye,
The Morning-star of Memory!"The Giaour, lines 1127-1130,
Poetical Works, 1900, iii. 136, 137.]
- ↑ ["This touching picture agrees closely, in many of its circumstances, with Lord Byron's own prose account of the wedding in his Memoranda; in which he describes himself as waking, on the morning of his marriage, with the most melancholy reflections, on seeing his
