While such sources of poetic feeling were stirred at every step, there was also in his quick change of place and scene—­in the diversity of men and manners surveyed by him—­in the perpetual hope of adventure and thirst of enterprise, such a succession and variety of ever fresh excitement as not only brought into play, but invigorated, all the energies of his character:  as he, himself, describes his mode of living, it was “To-day in a palace, to-morrow in a cow-house—­this day with the Pacha, the next with a shepherd.”  Thus were his powers of observation quickened, and the impressions on his imagination multiplied.  Thus schooled, too, in some of the roughnesses and privations of life, and, so far, made acquainted with the flavour of adversity, he learned to enlarge, more than is common in his high station, the circle of his sympathies, and became inured to that manly and vigorous cast of thought which is so impressed on all his writings.  Nor must we forget, among these strengthening and animating effects of travel, the ennobling excitement of danger, which he more than once experienced,—­having been placed in situations, both on land and sea, well calculated to call forth that pleasurable sense of energy, which perils, calmly confronted, never fail to inspire.

The strong interest which—­in spite of his assumed philosophy on this subject in Childe Harold—­he took in every thing connected with a life of warfare, found frequent opportunities of gratification, not only on board the English ships of war in which he sailed, but in his occasional intercourse with the soldiers of the country.  At Salora, a solitary place on the Gulf of Arta, he once passed two or three days, lodged in a small miserable barrack.  Here, he lived the whole time, familiarly, among the soldiers; and a picture of the singular scene which their evenings presented—­of those wild, half-bandit warriors, seated round the young poet, and examining with savage admiration his fine Manton gun[3] and English sword—­might be contrasted, but too touchingly, with another and a later picture of the same poet, dying, as a chieftain, on the same land, with Suliotes for his guards, and all Greece for his mourners.

It is true, amidst all this stimulating variety of objects, the melancholy which he had brought from home still lingered around his mind.  To Mr. Adair and Mr. Bruce, as I have before mentioned, he gave the idea of a person labouring under deep dejection; and Colonel Leake, who was, at that time, resident at Ioannina, conceived very much the same impression of the state of his mind.[4] But, assuredly, even this melancholy, habitually as it still clung to him, must, under the stirring and healthful influences of his roving life, have become a far more elevated and abstract feeling than it ever could have expanded to within reach of those annoyances, whose tendency was to keep it wholly concentrated round self.  Had he remained idly at home, he would have sunk, perhaps, into a