Part 28 (1/2)

The room and the bride, the paroxysry despair--broke forth upon her gentle head:--

'You ht have saved me from this, madam! You had all in your ohen I offered ht have made me what you pleased; but now you will find that you have married a devil!'

In Miss Martineau's Sketches, recently published, is an account of the terht them to one of Lady Byron's ancestral country seats, where they were to spend the honeymoon

Miss Martineau says,--

'At the altar she did not know that she was a sacrifice; but before sunset of that winter day she knew it, if a judgment may be forhted froe-day It was not the traces of tears which won the sympathy of the old butler who stood at the open door The bridegroohted, and caonized and listless with evident horror and despair The old servant longed to offer his ar, lonely creature, as an assurance of sympathy and protection From this shock she certainly rallied, and soon The pecuniary difficulties of her new home were exactly what a devoted spirit like hers was fitted to encounter Her husband bore testi, a reeable companion, never blessed any man's home When he afterwards called her cold and mathematical, and over-pious, and so forth, it hen public opinion had gone against him, and when he had discovered that her fidelity and ht be relied on, so that he was at full liberty to ood, as far as she was concerned

'Silent she was even to her own parents, whose feelings shehi hie of the dreadful reality into which she had entered couely, froe, that there was a dreadful secret of guilt; that Byron's soul was torn with agonies of reive to her in return for a love which was ready to do and dare all for hi and pleasing and cal theand gifted; with a peculiar air of refined and spiritual beauty; graceful in every movement; possessed of exquisite taste; a perfect coher walks of literary culture; and with that infinite pliability to all his varying, capriciousin her hand a princely fortune, which, with a woenerosity, was thrown at his feet,--there is no wonder that she ht feel for a while as if she could enter the lists with the very Devil hiht with a woman's weapons for the heart of her husband

There are indications scattered through the letters of Lord Byron, which, though brief indeed, showed that his young as ive him a cheerful home One of the poems that he sends to his publisher about this tihest regard for her literary judgments and opinions; and this little incident shows that she was already associating herself in a wifely fashi+on with his aims as an author

The poe, which she afterwards learned to understand only too well:--

'There's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away When the glow of early thought declines in feeling's dull decay: 'Tis not on youth's smooth cheek the blush alone that fades so fast; But the tender blooone e'er youth itself be past

Then the fehose spirits float above the wreck of happiness Are driven o'er the shoals of guilt, or ocean of excess: The one, or only points in vain The shore to which their shi+vered sail shall never stretch again'

Only a few days before she left him for ever, Lord Byron sent Murray e of Corinth,' and 'Parisina,' and wrote,--

'I a was a favourable omen of the morale of the piece: but you must not trust to that; for norance of innocence'

There were lucid intervals in which Lord Byron felt the charth of her powers 'Bell, you could be a poet too, if you only thought so,' he would say There were summer-hours in her stormy life, the entle and tender as he was beautiful; when he seeel: and then for a little time all the ideal possibilities of his nature stood revealed

The most dreadful el and devil The buds of hope and love called out by a day or two of sunshi+ne are frozen again and again, till the tree is killed

But there came an hour of revelation,--an hour when, in a manner which left no kind of room for doubt, Lady Byron saw the full depth of the abyss of infae was expected to cover, and understood that she was expected to be the cloak and the accomplice of this infamy

Many women would have been utterly crushed by such a disclosure; some would have fled from him immediately, and exposed and denounced the crime Lady Byron did neither When all the hope of woer, purer, and brighter, that immortal kind of love such as God feels for the sinner,--the love of which Jesus spoke, and which holds the one wanderer of more account than the ninety and nine that went not astray She would neither leave her husband nor betray him, nor yet would she for one moment justify his sin; and hence cale, in which soround, and then the evil one returned with sevenfold veheued his case with himself and with her with all the sophistries of his powerful mind He repudiated Christianity as authority; asserted the right of every hu to follow out what he called 'the impulses of nature' Subsequently he introduced into one of his dra by which he justified himself in incest

In the drama of 'Cain,' Adah, the sister and the wife of Cain, thus addresses him:--

'Cain, walk not with this spirit

Bear e have borne, and love me: I Love thee

Lucifer More than thy mother and thy sire?

Adah I do Is that a sin, too?

Lucifer No, not yet: It one day will be in your children

Adah What!