imagination.  But still, it is the newly-awakened power within him that is the source of the charm;—­it is the force of fancy alone that, acting upon his recollections, impregnates, as it were, all the past with poesy.  In this respect, such impressions of natural scenery as Lord Byron received in his childhood must be classed with the various other remembrances which that period leaves behind—­of its innocence, its sports, its first hopes and affections—­all of them reminiscences which the poet afterwards converts to his use, but which no more make the poet than—­to apply an illustration of Byron’s own—­the honey can be said to make the bee that treasures it.

When it happens—­as was the case with Lord Byron in Greece—­that the same peculiar features of nature, over which Memory has shed this reflective charm, are reproduced before the eyes under new and inspiring circumstances, and with all the accessories which an imagination, in its full vigour and wealth, can lend them, then, indeed, do both the past and present combine to make the enchantment complete; and never was there a heart more borne away by this confluence of feelings than that of Byron.  In a poem, written about a year or two before his death,[18] he traces all his enjoyment of mountain scenery to the impressions received during his residence in the Highlands; and even attributes the pleasure which he experienced in gazing upon Ida and Parnassus, far less to classic remembrances, than to those fond and deep-felt associations by which they brought back the memory of his boyhood and Lachin-y-gair.

    He who first met the Highland’s swelling blue,
    Will love each peak that shows a kindred hue,
    Hail in each crag a friend’s familiar face,
    And clasp the mountain in his mind’s embrace. 
    Long have I roam’d through lands which are not mine,
    Adored the Alp, and loved the Apennine,
    Revered Parnassus, and beheld the steep
    Jove’s Ida and Olympus crown the deep: 
    But ‘twas not all long ages’ lore, nor all
    Their nature held me in their thrilling thrall;
    The infant rapture still survived the boy,
    And Loch-na-gar with Ida look’d o’er Troy,
    Mix’d Celtic memories with the Phrygian mount,
    And Highland linns with Castalie’s clear fount.

In a note appended to this passage, we find him falling into that sort of anachronism in the history of his own feelings, which I have above adverted to as not uncommon, and referring to childhood itself that love of mountain prospects, which was but the after result of his imaginative recollections of that period.