“Before ascending the mountain, went to the torrent again, the sun upon it forming a rainbow of the lower part, of all colours but principally purple and gold, the bow moving as you move.  I never saw anything like this; it is only in the sunshine....  Left the horses, took off my coat, and went to the summit, 7000 English feet above the level of the sea, and 5000 feet above the valley we left in the morning.  On one side our view comprised the Jungfrau, with all her glaciers; then the Dent d’Argent, shining like truth; then the Eighers and the Wetterhorn.  Heard the avalanches falling every five minutes.  From where we stood on the Wengern Alp we had all these in view on one side; on the other, the clouds rose up from the opposite valley, curling up perpendicular precipices, like the foam of the ocean of hell during a spring tide; it was white and sulphury, and immeasurably deep in appearance....  Arrived at the Grindelwald; dined; mounted again, and rode to the higher glacier—­like a frozen hurricane; starlight beautiful, but a devil of a path.  Passed whole woods of withered pines, all withered; trunks stripped and barkless, branches lifeless; done by a single winter.  Their appearance reminded me of me and my family.”

Students of Manfred will recognize whole sentences, only slightly modified in its verse.  Though Byron talks with contempt of authorship, there is scarce a fine phrase in his letters or journal which is not pressed into the author’s service.  He turns his deepest griefs to artistic gain, and uses five or six times for literary purposes the expression which seems to have dropped from him naturally about his household gods being shivered on his hearth.  His account of this excursion concludes with a passage equally characteristic of his melancholy and incessant self-consciousness:—­

“In the weather for this tour, I have been very fortunate....  I was disposed to be pleased.  I am a lover of nature, &c....  But in all this the recollection of bitterness, and more especially of recent and more home desolation, which must accompany me through life, have preyed upon me here; and neither the music of the shepherd, the crashing of the avalanche, the torrent, the mountain, the glacier, the forest, nor the cloud, have for one moment lightened the weight upon my heart, nor enabled me to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty, and the power, and the glory around, above, and beneath me.”

Such egotism in an idle man would only provoke impatience; but Byron was, during the whole of this period, almost preternaturally active.  Detained by bad weather at Ouchy for two days (Juno 26, 27), he wrote the Prisoner of Chillon, which, with its noble introductory sonnet on Bonnivard, in some respects surpasses any of his early romances.  The opening lines,—­

  Lake Leman lies by Chillon’s walls;
  A thousand feet in depth below,
  Its massy waters meet and flow,—­

bring before us in a few words the conditions of a hopeless bondage.  The account of the prisoner himself, and of the lingering deaths of the brothers; the first frenzy of the survivor, and the desolation which succeeds it—­