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[page 275, full page, continued:]
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BYRON AND MISS CHAWORTH.
———
BY EDGAR A. POE.
———
(See Engraving.)
[column 1:]
"LES ANGES," says Madame
Dudevant,
a woman who intersperses many an admirable sentiment amid a chaos of
the
most shameless and altogether objectionable fiction — "Les anges ne
sont plus pures que le cœur d'un jeune homme qui aime en
vérité." The angels are not more pure than the heart
of a young
man who
loves
with fervor.
The hyperbole is scarcely less than true. It
would
be truth itself, were it averred of the love of him who is at the same
time young and a poet. The boyish poet-love is indisputably that one of
the human sentiments which most nearly realizes our dreams of the
chastened
voluptuousness of heaven.
In every allusion made by the author of "Childe
Harold" to his passion for Mary Chaworth, there runs a vein of almost
spiritual
tenderness and purity, strangely in contrast with the gross earthliness
pervading and disfiguring his ordinary love-poems. The Dream, in which
the incidents of his parting with her when about to travel, are said to
be delineated, or at least parralleled [[paralleled]], has never been
excelled
(certainly
never excelled by him) in the blended fervor, delicacy, truthfulness
and
ethereality which sublimate and adorn it. For this reason, it may well
be doubted if he has written anything so universally popular.
That his attachment for this "Mary" (in whose
very
name there indeed seemed to exist for him an "enchantment") was
earnest,
and long-abiding, we have every reason to believe. There are a hundred
evidences of this fact, scattered not only through his own poems and
letters,
but in the memoirs of his relatives, and cotemporaries in general. But
that it was thus earnest and enduring, does not controvert, in
any
degree, the opinion that it was a passion (if passion it can properly
be
termed) of the most thoroughly romantic, shadowy and imaginative
character.
It was born of the hour, and of the youthful necessity to love, while
it
was nurtured by the waters and the hills, and the flowers and the
stars.
It had no peculiar regard to the person, or to the character, or to the
reciprocating affection [column 2:] of Mary Chaworth. Any
maiden, not immediately
and
positively repulsive, he would have loved, under the same circumstances
of hourly and unrestricted communion, such as our engraving shadows
forth.
They met without restraint and without reserve. As mere children they
sported
together; in boyhood and girlhood they read from the same books, sang
the
same songs, or roamed, hand in hand, through the grounds of the
conjoining
estates. The result was not merely natural or merely probable, it was
as
inevitable as destiny itself.
In view of a passion thus engendered, Miss
Chaworth,
(who is represented as possessed of no little personal beauty and some
accomplishments,) could not have failed to serve sufficiently well as
the
incarnation of the ideal that haunted the fancy of the poet. It is
perhaps
better, nevertheless, for the mere romance of the love-passages between
the two, that their intercourse was broken up in early life and never
uninterruptedly
resumed in after years. Whatever of warmth, whatever of soul-passion,
whatever
of the truer nare and essentiality of romance was elicited during the
youthful
association is to be attributed altogether to the poet. If she felt
at all, it was only while the magnetism of his actual presence
compelled
her to feel. If she responded at all, it was merely because
the
necromancy of his words of fire could not do otherwise than
exhort
a response. In absence, the bard bore easily with him all the fancies
which
were the basis of his flame — a flame which absence itself but served
to
keep in vigor — while the less ideal but at the same time the less
really
substantial affection of his ladye-love, perished utterly and
forthwith,
through simple lack of the element which had fanned it into being. He
to
her, in brief, was a not unhandsome, and not ignoble. [[,]] but
somewhat
portionless, somewhat eccentric and rather lame young man. She to him
was
the Egeria of his dreams — the Venus Aphrodite that sprang, in full and
supernal loveliness, from the bright foam upon the storm-tormented
ocean
of his thoughts. |
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