It might be months, or years, or days —

I kept no count, I took no note I had no hope my eyes to raise,

And clear them of their dreary mote;

At last men came to set me free;

I asked not why, and recked not where;
It was at length the same to me,
Fettered or fetterless to be,

I learned to love despair.

And thus when they appeared at last,
And all my bonds aside were cast,
These heavy walls to me had grown
A hermitage and all my own!

And half I felt as they were come
To tear me from a second home:
With spiders I had friendship made,
And watched them in their sullen trade,
Had seen the mice by moonlight play,
And why should I feel less than they?
We were all inmates of one place,
And I, the monarch of each race,

360

370

380

Had power to kill — yet, strange to tell!
In quiet we had learned to dwell;
My very chains and I grew friends,
So much a long communion tends
To make us what we are ;

390

even I

Regained my freedom with a sigh.

STANZAS TO AUGUSTA

These stanzas were written at the Villa Diodati, near Geneva, July, 1816, and form one of several poems addressed to the poet's halfsister, Augusta (Mrs. Leigh), who was true to her brother through all his career, and for whom he felt the warmest affection up to the very end of his life. This is but one among Byron's many autobiographical poems, the egotism of which is amply redeemed by the revelation of a rich and interesting personality.

I

HOUGH the day of my Destiny's over,

THOU

And the star of my Fate hath declined,

Thy soft heart refused to discover

The faults which so many could find;

Though thy soul with my grief was acquainted,
It shrunk not to share it with me,

And the Love which my Spirit hath painted
It never hath found but in Thee.

II

Then when Nature around me is smiling,
The last smile which answers to mine,

I do not believe it beguiling,

Because it reminds me of thine;

And when winds are at war with the ocean,
As the breasts I believed in with me,

If their billows excite an emotion,
It is that they bear me from Thee.

III

Though the rock of my last Hope is shivered,
And its fragments are sunk in the wave,
Though I feel that my soul is delivered

To Pain - it shall not be its slave.

There is many a pang to pursue me:

They may crush, but they shall not contemn They may torture, but shall not subdue me 'Tis of Thee that I think - not of them.

IV

Though human, thou didst not deceive me,
Though woman, thou didst not forsake,
Though loved, thou forborest to grieve me,

Though slandered, thou never couldst shake,
Though trusted, thou didst not disclaim me,
Though parted, it was not to fly,
Though watchful, 't was not to defame me,
Nor, mute, that the world might belie.

V

Yet I blame not the World, nor despise it,
Nor the war of the many with one;
If my soul was not fitted to prize it,
'T was folly not sooner to shun:
And if dearly that error hath cost me,
And more than I once could foresee,
I have found that, whatever it lost me,
It could not deprive me of Thee.

VI

From the wreck of the past, which hath perished, Thus much I at least may recall,