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Beyond the mere prettiness and pinky whiteness of a healthy country lass, Miss Chaworth evidently had no beauties of character, save those conjured forth from the inner consciousness of the poet–a not wholly original condition.

Byron loved the Ideal. And this love-affair with Miss Chaworth is only valuable as showing the evolution of imagination in the poet. The woman hadn’t the slightest idea that she was giving wings to a soul–to her the affair was simply funny.

The fact that Byron’s great-uncle, from whom he had inherited his title, had killed the grandfather of Miss Chaworth in a duel, lent a romantic tinge to the matter–the boy was doing a sort of penance, and in one of his poems hints at the undoing of the sin of his kinsman by the lifelong devotion that he will bestow. This calling up the past, and incautious revealing of the fact that the ancestor Chaworth could not hold his own with a Byron, but allowed himself to be run through the body by the Byron cold steel, was not pleasing to Miss Chaworth.

“Don’t imagine I am such a fool as to love that lame boy,” cried Miss Chaworth to her maid one day.

Unluckily, “the lame boy” was in the next room and heard the remark.

He rushed from the house with a something gripping at his heart. Straightway he would go back to Harrow, which he had left in wrath only a few months before.

So he went to Harrow.

When he next returned home, his mother met him with the remark, “I have news for you; get out your handkerchief–Miss Chaworth is married.”

In just another year Byron was home again, and was invited to dine with the Chaworths. He accepted the invitation, and when he was introduced to a baby girl, a month old, the child of his old sweetheart, his emotions got the better of him and he had to leave the room. And to ease his woe he indited a poem to the baby.

Miss Chaworth was not happy with her fox-hunting squire. Her mind became clouded, and after some years she passed out, in poverty and alone. And if there ever came to her mind any appreciation of the greatness of the man who had given her name immortality, we do not know it.

The years from Eighteen Hundred Five to Eighteen Hundred Eight Byron spent at Cambridge. The arts in which he perfected himself there were shooting, swimming, fencing, drinking and gambling.

During vacations, and off and on, he lived at Southwell, a village halfway between Mansfield and Newark. Southwell was sleepy, gossipy, dull–and exerted a wholesome restraint on our restless youth. It was simply a question of economy that took Byron and his mother to Southwell. The run-down estate of Newstead was yielding a meager income, but at Southwell one could be shabby and yet respectable.

At Southwell Byron met John Pigot and his sister–cultured people of a refined and quiet sort. Byron took to them at once, and they liked him.

In a country town the person who thinks, instinctively hunts out the other man who thinks–granting the somewhat daring hypothesis that there are two of them. So Byron and the Pigots often met for walks and talks, and on such occasions the poet would read to his friends the scraps of verse he had written. He had gotten into the habit–he wrote whenever his pulse ran up above eighty–he wrote because he could not help it; and he read his productions to his friends for the same reason. Every one who writes longs to read his work to some sympathetic soul. A thought is not ours until we repeat it to another, and this crying need of expression marks every poetic soul. All art is born of feeling, high, intense, holy feeling, and the creative faculty is largely a matter of temperature. We feel, and not to impart our feelings is stagnation–death. People who do not feel deeply never have anything to impart, either to individuals or to the world. They have no message.