In the bitterness of his desolation he recalled the days when they were at Newstead together--probably stolen interviews, which find no place in history--when
'many a day In these, to me, deserted towers, Ere called but for a time away, Affection's mingling tears were ours? Ours, too, the glance none saw beside; The smile none else might understand; The whispered thought: the walks aside; The pressure of the thrilling hand; The kiss so guiltless and relined, That Love each warmer wish forbore; Those eyes proclaimed so pure a mind, Ev'n Passion blushed to plead for more. The tone that taught me to rejoice, When prone, unlike thee, to repine; _The song, celestial from thy voice, But sweet to me from none but thine_; The pledge we wore--_I_ wear it still, But where is thine? Ah! where art thou? Oft have I borne the weight of ill, But never bent beneath till now!'
Six days after these lines were written Byron left Newstead. Writing to Hodgson from his lodgings in St. James's Street, he enclosed some stanzas which he had written a day or two before, 'on hearing a song of former days.' The lady, whose singing now so deeply impressed Byron, was the Hon. Mrs. George Lamb, whom he had met at Melbourne House.
In this, the second of the 'Thyrza' poems, the allusions to Mary Chaworth are even more marked. Byron says the songs of Mrs. George Lamb 'speak to him of brighter days,' and that he hopes to hear those strains no more:
'For now, alas! I must not think, I may not gaze, On what I _am_--on what I _was_.
The voice that made those sounds more sweet Is hush'd, and all their charms are fled.
'On my ear The well-remembered echoes thrill; I hear a voice I would not hear, A voice that now might well be still.
'Sweet Thyrza! waking as in sleep, Thou art but now a lovely dream; _A Star_ that trembled o'er the deep, Then turned from earth its tender beam. But he who through Life's dreary way Must pass, when Heaven is veiled in wrath, Will long lament the vanished ray That scattered gladness o'er his path.'
In Byron's imagination Mary Chaworth was always hovering over him like a star. She was the 'starlight of his boyhood,' the 'star of his destiny,' and three years later the poet, in his unpublished fragment 'Harmodia,' speaks of Mary as his