What longing in tears for you – You – my Life – my All – farewell. Oh, go on loving me – never doubt the faithfullest heart of your beloved.
L
Ever thine.
Ever mine.
Ever ours.
‘Byronic’ has become shorthand for a particular type of romantic hero – pale, dark-haired, hollowcheeked, cruel, reckless, irresistible to many women and therefore a source of deep irritation to the better behaved and more reliable sort of man so often and so inexplicably overlooked. Byron’s behaviour, and his poetry, scandalized large parts of Europe to the extent that in 1924, a hundred years after his death, a petition for a memorial to him in Westminster Abbey was refused by the dean, whose opinion it was that ‘Byron, partly by his openly dissolute life and partly by the influence of his licentious verse, earned a world-wide reputation for immorality among English-speaking people’.Of the many entanglements of Byron’s life, one of the most notorious was with the married Lady Caroline Lamb; in July 1813, it was rumoured that following a quarrel with him at a party, she tried to stab herself first with a knife, then with a broken glass. Eventually, she withdrew to Ireland, and the letter that follows was written to her there.
My dearest Caroline,
If the tears, which you saw, and I know I am not apt to shed; if the agitation in which I parted from you – agitation which you must have perceived through the whole of this nervous affair, did not commence till the moment of leaving you approached; if all I have said and done, and am still but too ready to say and do, have not sufficiently proved what my feelings are, and must ever be, towards you, my love, I have no other proof to offer. God knows I never knew till this moment the madness of my dear dearest and most beloved friend. I cannot express myself, this is no time for words – but I shall have a pride, a melancholy pleasure, in suffering what you yourself can scarcely conceive, for you do not know me.
I am about to go out with a heavy heart, for my appearing this evening will stop any absurd story to which the events of the day might give rise. Do you think now I am cold and stern and wilful? Will ever others think so? Will your mother ever? The mother to whom we must indeed sacrifice much more, much more on my part than she shall ever know, or can imagine.‘Promise not to love you’? Ah, Caroline, it is past promising! But I shall attribute all concessions to the proper motive, and never cease to feel all that you have already witnessed, and more than ever can be known, but to my own heart – perhaps, to yours. May God forgive, protect and bless you ever and ever, more than ever. –Your most attached.
Byron
P.S. –These taunts have driven you to this, my dearest Caroline, and were it not for your mother, and the kindness of your connexions, is there anything in heaven or earth that would have made me so happy as to have made you mine long ago? And not less now than then, but more than ever at this time God knows I wish you happy, and when I quit you, or rather you, from a sense of duty to your husband and mother, quit me, you shall acknowledge the truth of what I again promise and vow, that no other, in word nor deed, shall ever hold the place in my affections which is and shall be sacred to you till I am nothing. You know I would with pleasure give up all here or beyond the grave for you, and in refraining from this must my motives be misunderstood? I care not who knows this, what use is made of it – it is to you and to you only, yourself. I was, and am yours, freely and entirely, to obey, to honour, love and fly with you, when, where, and how, yourself might and may determine.
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