In Byron’s day, Matlock was a fashionable watering-place; and the drawing-room of the “Old Bath,” with cut-glass chandeliers, old engravings, and cushioned window-seats, looks much the same as when it witnessed many a gay assembly.  In this room the wayward and sensitive youth, secretly writhing with mortification at being prevented by lameness from leading Mary Chaworth to the dance, watched, her more fortunate partners with moody envy.  The young Lady of Annesley little imagined that the lame boy, with his handsome face and troublesome temper, would link her name to deathless song.

On a fair, sunny morning, towards the close of October, we left Matlock for Annesley Hall and Newstead Abbey.  The day was in harmony with the poetical associations of our excursion:  a gentle mist hung like a veil over hills and groves, giving a dreamy aspect to Nature, and rendering the places we intended to visit creations of fancy rather than actual facts.  Very unromantic personages, however, answered our inquiries for Annesley, which reassured us of its reality.  Byron’s “Dream” had rendered the scenery familiar to our memory.

                 “The hill
  Green and of mild declivity, the last,
  As ’t were the cape, of a long ridge of such,
  Save that there was no sea to lave its base,
  But a most living landscape.”

Our approach led us beside those gentle slopes, and we seemed to see the maiden and the youth standing on the mild declivity, with its crowning circlet of trees.

“And both were young, but not alike in youth: 
As the sweet moon on the horizon’s verge,
The maid was on the eve of womanhood;
The boy had fewer summers.

           “...  She was his life,

The ocean to the river of his thoughts. 
Her sighs were not for him; to her he was
Even as a brother, but no more; ’twas much,
For brotherless she was, save in the name
Her infant friendship had bestowed on him,
Herself the solitary scion left
Of a time-honored race.

            “Even now she loved another,

And on the summit of that hill she stood
Looking afar, if yet her lover’s steed
Kept pace with her expectancy and flew.”

That lover, soon after, became the husband of Mary Chaworth.  It is not for us to speculate wherefore Destiny entangled the threads in that web of existence which originally seemed to have woven the fates of Byron and Mary Chaworth together.  We are ignorant of spiritual laws, and know little of the origin whence come those strange attractions, mind to mind, heart to heart, which make or mar the life-experiences of us all.

Had events been ordered otherwise, Byron might have been a better and happier man, but the world would never have received the gift of “Childe Harold.”  Alas, that the soul must be ploughed and harrowed, and the precious seed trodden in, before it can give forth its fairest-flowers or its immortal fruit!