“Call it rather a treacle moon!”

It is hardly necessary here to tell over the story of their domestic troubles.  Only five weeks after their daughter’s birth, they parted.  Lady Byron declared that her husband was insane; while after trying many times to win from her something more than a tepid affection, he gave up the task in a sort of despairing anger.  It should be mentioned here, for the benefit of those who recall the hideous charges made many decades afterward by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe on the authority of Lady Byron, that the latter remained on terms of friendly intimacy with Augusta Leigh, Lord Byron’s sister, and that even on her death-bed she sent an amicable message to Mrs. Leigh.

Byron, however, stung by the bitter attacks that were made upon him, left England, and after traveling down the Rhine through Switzerland, he took up his abode in Venice.  His joy at leaving England and ridding himself of the annoyances which had clustered thick about him, he expressed in these lines: 

    Once more upon the waters! yet once more! 
    And the waves bound beneath me as a steed
    That knows his rider.  Welcome to the roar!

Meanwhile he enjoyed himself in reckless fashion.  Money poured in upon him from his English publisher.  For two cantos of “Childe Harold” and “Manfred,” Murray paid him twenty thousand dollars.  For the fourth canto, Byron demanded and received more than twelve thousand dollars.  In Italy he lived on friendly terms with Shelley and Thomas Moore; but eventually he parted from them both, for he was about to enter upon a new phase of his curious career.

He was no longer the Byron of 1815.  Four years of high living and much brandy-and-water had robbed his features of their refinement.  His look was no longer spiritual.  He was beginning to grow stout.  Yet the change had not been altogether unfortunate.  He had lost something of his wild impetuosity, and his sense of humor had developed.  In his thirtieth year, in fact, he had at last become a man.

It was soon after this that he met a woman who was to be to him for the rest of his life what a well-known writer has called “a star on the stormy horizon of the poet.”  This woman was Teresa, Countess Guiccioli, whom he first came to know in Venice.  She was then only nineteen years of age, and she was married to a man who was more than forty years her senior.  Unlike the typical Italian woman, she was blonde, with dreamy eyes and an abundance of golden hair, and her manner was at once modest and graceful.  She had known Byron but a very short time when she found herself thrilling with a passion of which until then she had never dreamed.  It was written of her: 

She had thought of love but as an amusement; yet she now became its slave.