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At Shelley's urgency, Byron agreed to give up his plan of joining the Gambas in Switzerland, and to remain in Italy if they too would consent. By Shelley's mediation this consent was gained, Shelley undertaking to find a house for them at Pisa, where he was himself living. Another result of the visit was the invitation to Leigh Hunt, conveyed in a letter from Shelley, to come to Pisa and " go shares" with Byron and himself in a periodical to be published there, in which each of the contracting parties should publish all his original compositions and share the profits. This is the first definite step towards the actual embodiment of Byron's long-cherished idea of a review of his own for the publication of his own works, which later took shape in the ill-starred “Liberal.”

The incidents of the Ravenna life are exhibited very fully by Byron himself in a "Diary" and a book of "Detached Thoughts." In these comes the announcement (February 24, 1821) of the failure of the revolutionary movement, and "thus the Italians are always lost for lack of union among themselves.” And again (May 1, 1821), "Some day or other, if dust holds together, I have been enough in the secret (at least in this part of the country) to cast perhaps some little light upon the atrocious treachery which has replunged Italy into barbarism. Come what may, the cause was a glorious one, though it reads at present as if the Greeks had run away from Xerxes.”

STANZAS TO THE PO

RIVER, that rollest by the ancient walls,

Where dwells the lady of my love, when she
Walks by thy brink, and there perchance recalls
A faint and fleeting memory of me;

What if thy deep and ample stream should be
A mirror of my heart, where she may read
The thousand thoughts I now betray to thee,
Wild as thy wave, and headlong as thy speed!

What do I say

-a mirror of my heart?

Are not thy waters sweeping, dark, and strong?
Such as my feelings were and are, thou art;
And such as thou art were my passions long.

Time have somewhat tamed them,
may

not for ever;

Thou overflow'st thy banks, and not for aye Thy bosom overboils, congenial river!

Thy floods subside, and mine have sunk away

But left long wrecks behind: and now again,
Borne in our old unchanged career, we move;

Thou tendest wildly onwards to the main.
And I to loving one I should not love.

The current I behold will sweep beneath

Her native walls and murmur at her feet;
Her eyes will look on thee, when she shall breathe
The twilight air, unharm'd by summer's heat.

She will look on thee, I have look'd on thee,

Full of that thought; and, from that moment, ne'er Thy waters could I dream of, name, or see,

Without the inseparable sigh for her!

Her bright eyes will be imaged in thy stream,
Yes! they will meet the wave I gaze on now:
Mine cannot witness, even in a dream,

That happy wave repass me in its flow!

The wave that bears my tears returns no more:

Will she return by whom that wave shall sweep? Both tread thy banks, both wander on thy shore, I by thy source, she by the dark-blue deep.

But that which keepeth us apart is not

Distance, nor depth of wave, nor space of earth, But the distraction of a various lot,

As various as the climates of our birth.

A stranger loves the lady of the land,

Born far beyond the mountains, but his blood Is all meridian, as if never fann'd

By the black wind that chills the polar flood.

My blood is all meridian; were it not,

I had not left my clime, nor should I be,

In spite of tortures, ne'er to be forgot,
A slave again of love, - at least of thee.