4 ORIGINAL POEM BY LORD BYRON. 



To the Editor of the " MONTHLY MAGAZINE." 



SIR, The accompanying verses by Lord Byron are perhaps equal 

 to any he ever wrote. Independently of their great tenderness, there 

 is a poetical beauty in the language at once very original and touch- 

 ing. Perhaps in the inspirations of occasional feeling, this great poet 

 was more transcendently remarkable than in his more elaborate 

 effusions. The public, I am sure, will receive the present stanzas as 

 a relic that deserves to be enshrined with no ordinary solicitude. 



In looking at my Life of him about this time, I find the following 

 very singular passage : 



" Before the year (1814) was at an end, his popularity was evidently 

 beginning to wane. Of this he was conscious himself, and braved the frequent 

 attacks on his character and genius with an affectation of indifference ; under 

 which, those who had at all observed the singular associations of his recol- 

 lections and ideas, must have discerned the symptoms of a strange disease. 

 He was tainted with a Herodian malady of the mind; his thoughts were 

 often hateful to himself; but there was an ecstasy in the conception, as if 

 delight could be mingled with horror. I think, however, he struggled to 

 master the fatality : and that his resolution to marry was dictated by an 

 honourable desire to give hostages to society against the wild wilfulness of 

 his imagination. 



" It is a curious and a mystical fact, that at the period to which I am 

 alluding, and a very little time only a little month before he successfully 

 solicited the hand of Miss Milbanke, being at Newstead (probably at the time 

 he wrote the verses), he fancied that he saw the ghost of the monk which is 

 supposed to haunt the Abbey, and to make its ominous appearance when 

 misfortune or death impends over the master of the mansion. The story of 

 the apparition, in the sixteenth Canto of Don Juan, is derived from this 

 family legend, and Norman Abbey, in the thirteenth of the same poem, is a 

 rich and elaborate description of Newstead. 



" After his proposal to Miss Milbanke had been accepted, a considerable 

 time nearly three months elapsed before the marriage was completed, in 

 consequence of the embarrassed condition in which, when the necessary 

 settlements were to be made, he found his affairs. This state of things, 

 with the previous unhappy controversy with himself, and anger at the world, 

 was ill calculated to gladden his nuptials. But, beside these evils, his mind 

 was awed with gloomy presentiments a shadow of some advancing misfor- 

 tune darkened his spirit, and the ceremony was performed with sacrificial 

 feelings, and those dark and chilling circumstances which he has so 

 touchingly described in The Dream. He was married on the 2nd of 

 January, 1815." 



I scarcely expected to find, in the handwriting of Byron himself, 

 such an illustration of the justice I had done to his feelings in the 

 above description. It gives me, however, but melancholy pleasure 

 to find I was so correct; and it should make some of those who have 

 attacked my biography of his lordship, a little more careful in con- 

 demning what they had no opportunity of either seeing or sifting. 



I remain, Sir, 



Yours faithfully, 



JOHN GALT. 

 Barn Cottage, Dec. 28, 1833. 



