—Editor ↩
“… my May of Life
Macbeth, act V sc. 3, lines 22, 23
Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf.”
—Editor ↩
Itself to that fit apathy whose deed.
—[MS.]
First in the icy depths of Lethe’s spring.
—[MS.]
See “Introduction to the Morgante Maggiore,” Poetical Works, 1901, IV 280. —Editor ↩
Pulci being Father—.
—[MS. Alternative reading]
“Cum canerem reges et praelia, Cynthius aurem
Vellit, et admonuit.”
Virgil, Ecl. VI lines 3, 4
—Editor ↩
—from its mother’s knee
—[MS.]
When its last weaning draught is drained for ever,
The child divided—it were less to see,
Than these two from each other torn apart.
See Herodotus (Cleobis and Biton), I 31. The sentiment is in a fragment of Menander.
Ὅν οἱ θεοὶ φιλοῦσιν ἀποθνήσκει νέος
or
Ὅν γὰρ φιλεῖ θεὸς ἀποθνήσκει νέος.
Menandri at Philomenis reliquiae, edidit Augustus Meineke, p. 48
See Letters, 1898, II 22, note 1. Byron applied the saying to Allegra in a letter to Sir Walter Scott, dated May 4, 1822, Letters, 1901, VI 57. —Editor ↩
Compare Childe Harold, Canto II stanza XCVI line 7. Compare, too, Young’s Night Thoughts (“The Complaint,” Night I ed. 1825, p. 5). —Editor ↩
Compare Swift’s “little language” in his letter to Stella: Podefar, for instance, which is supposed to stand for “Poor dear foolish rogue,” and Ppt., which meant “Poor pretty thing.”—See The Journal of Stella, edited by G. A. Aitken, 1901, XXXV note 1, and “Journal: March, 1710–11,” 165, note 2. —Editor ↩
For theirs were buoyant spirits, which would bound
—[MS.]
’Gainst common failings, etc.
The reference may be to Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” which, to Medwin’s wonderment, “delighted” Byron (Conversations, 1824, p. 264). De Quincy’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater appeared in the London Magazine, October, November, 1821, after Cantos III, IV, V, of Don Juan were published. But, perhaps, he was contrasting the “simpler blisses” of Juan and Haidée with Shelley’s mystical affinities and divagations. —Editor ↩
—had set their hearts a bleeding.
—[MS.]
“The shadowy desert, unfrequented woods,
Two Gentlemen of Verona, act V sc. 4, lines 2–6
I better brook than flourishing peopled towns:
There can I sit alone, unseen of any,
And to the nightingale’s complaining notes
Tune my distresses, and record, my woes.”
—Editor ↩
Called social, where all Vice and Hatred are.
—[MS.]
Moved with her dream—.
—[MS.]
Strange state of being!—for ’tis still to be—
—[MS.]
And who can know all false what then we see?
Compare the description of the “spacious cave,” in The Island, Canto IV lines 121, sq., Poetical Works, 1901, V 629, note 1. —Editor ↩
—methought.
—[MS. Alternative reading]
The reader will observe a curious mark of propinquity which the poet notices, with respect to the hands of the father and daughter. Lord Byron, we suspect, is indebted for the first hint of this to Ali Pacha, who, by the by, is the original of Lambro; for, when his lordship was introduced, with his friend Hobhouse, to that agreeable mannered tyrant, the Vizier said that he knew he was the Megalos Anthropos (i.e. the great Man), by the smallness of his ears and hands.—Galt. See Byron’s letter to his mother, November 12, 1809, Letters, 1898, I 251. —Editor ↩
And if I did my duty as thou hast,
—[MS.]
This hour were thine, and thy young minions last.
Till further orders should his doom assign.
—[MS.]
Loving and loved—.
—[MS.]
But thou, sweet fury of the fiery rill,
—[MS.]
Makest on the liver a still worse attack;
Besides, thy price is something dearer still.
“As squire Sullen says, ‘My head aches consumedly,’ ‘Scrub, bring me a dram!’ Drank some Imola wine, and some punch!”
—Extracts from a Diary, February 25, 1821, Letters, 1901, V 209
For rack or “arrack” punch, see Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, a Novel Without a Hero, chap. VI ed. 1892, p. 44. —Editor ↩
“At Fas [Fez] the houses of the great and wealthy have, within-side, spacious courts, adorned with sumptuous galleries, fountains, basons of fine marble, and fishponds, shaded with orange, lemon, pomegranate, and fig trees, abounding with fruit, and ornamented with roses, hyacinths, jasmine, violets, and orange flowers, emitting a delectable fragrance.”
—Account of the Empire of Marocco and Suez, by James Grey Jackson, 1811, pp. 69, 70
—Editor ↩
Beauty and Passion were the natural dower
Of Haidée’s mother, but her climate’s force
Lay at her heart, though sleeping at the source.
or,
But in her large eye lay deep Passion’s force,
Like to a lion sleeping by a source.
or,
But in her large eye lay deep Passion’s force,
—[MS.]
As sleeps a lion by a river’s source.
Compare Manfred, act III sc. 1, line 128, Poetical Works, 1901, IV 125. —Editor ↩
The blood gushed from her lips, and ears, and eyes:
—[MS.]
Those eyes, so beautiful—beheld no more.
This is no very uncommon effect of the violence of conflicting and different passions. The Doge Francis Foscari, on his deposition in 1457, hearing the bells of St. Mark announce the election of his successor, “mourut subitement d’une hémorragie causée par une veine qui s’éclata dans sa poitrine” [see Sismondi, 1815, X 46,
