hurt; laughed, and rode on. Arrived at the Grindenwald; dined, mounted
again, and rode to the higher glacier--like _a frozen hurricane_.[4]
Starlight, beautiful, but a devil of a path! Never mind, got safe in;
a little lightning, but the whole of the day as fine in point of
weather as the day on which Paradise was made. Passed _whole woods of
withered pines, all withered_; trunks stripped and lifeless, branches
lifeless; done by a single winter."[5]


[5] Like these _blasted pines,
Wrecks of a single winter, barkless, branchless_
MANFRED.


_Shelley and Byron,_

It appears, first met at Geneva:--

There was no want of disposition towards acquaintance on either side,
and an intimacy almost immediately sprung up between them. Among the
tastes common to both, that for boating was not the least strong; and
in this beautiful region they had more than ordinary temptations to
indulge in it. Every evening, during their residence under the same
roof at Sécheron, they embarked, accompanied by the ladies and
Polidori, on the Lake; and to the feelings and fancies inspired by
these excursions, which were not unfrequently prolonged into the hour
of moonlight, we are indebted for some of those enchanting stanzas[6]
in which the poet has given way to his passionate love of Nature so
fervidly.