Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey

addition to being deaf and dumb, she saw but imperfectly. They carried on a communication by means of a small slate, which she drew out of her reticule, and on which they wrote their questions and replies. In writing or reading she always approached her eyes close to the written characters.
    This defective organization was accompanied by a morbid sensibility almost amounting to disease. She had not been born deaf and dumb; but had lost her hearing in a fit of sickness, and with it the power of distinct articulation. Her life had evidently been checkered and unhappy; she was apparently without family or friend, a lonely, desolate being, cut off from society by her infirmities.
    “I am always among strangers,” she said, “as much so in my native country as I could be in the remotest parts of the world. By all I am considered as a stranger and an alien; no one will acknowledge any connection with me. I seem not to belong to the human species.”
    Such were the circumstances that Colonel Wildman was able to draw forth in the course of his conversation, and they strongly interested him in favor of this poor enthusiast. He was too devout an admirer of Lord Byron himself, not to sympathize in this extraordinary zeal of one of his votaries, and he entreated her to renew her visits at the Abbey, assuring her that the edifice and its grounds should always be open to her.
    The Little White Lady now resumed her daily walks in the Monk’s Garden, and her occasional seat at the foot of the monument; she was shy and diffident, however, and evidently fearful of intruding. If any persons were walking in the garden she would avoid them, and seek the most remote parts; and was seen like a sprite, only by gleams and glimpses, as she glided among the groves and thickets. Many of her feelings and fancies, during these lonely rambles, were embodied in verse, noted down on her tablet, and transferred to paper in the evening on her return to the farmhouse. Some of these verses now lie before me, written with considerable harmony of versification, but chiefly curious as being illustrative of that singular and enthusiastic idolatry with which she almost worshipped the genius of Byron, or rather, the romantic image of him formed by her imagination.
    Two or three extracts may not be unacceptable. The following are from a long rhapsody addressed to Lord Byron:
    “By what dread charm thou rulest the mind
It is not given for us to know;
We glow with feelings undefined,
Nor can explain from whence they flow.
    “Not that fond love which passion breathes
And youthful hearts inflame;
The soul a nobler homage gives,
And bows to thy great name.
    “Oft have we own’d the muses’ skill,
And proved the power of song,
But sweeter notes ne’er woke the thrill
That solely to thy verse belong.
    “This—but far more, for thee we prove,
Something that bears a holier name,
Than the pure dream of early love,
Or friendship’s nobler flame.
    “Something divine—Oh! what it is
Thy muse alone can tell,
So sweet, but so profound the bliss
We dread to break the spell.”
    This singular and romantic infatuation, for such it might truly be called, was entirely spiritual and ideal, for, as she herself declares in another of her rhapsodies, she had never beheld Lord Byron; he was, to her, a mere phantom of the brain.
    “I ne’er have drunk thy glance—thy form
My earthly eye has never seen,
Though oft when fancy’s visions warm,
It greets me in some blissful dream.
    “Greets me, as greets the sainted seer
Some radiant visitant from high,
When heaven’s own strains break on his ear,
And wrap his soul in ecstasy.”
    Her poetical wanderings and musings were not confined to the Abbey grounds, but extended to all parts of the neighborhood connected with the memory of Lord Byron, and among the rest to the groves and gardens of Annesley Hall, the seat of his early passion for Miss Chaworth. One of her poetical effusions mentions her having seen from Howet’s Hill in Annesley Park, a “sylph-like form,” in a car drawn by milk-white horses, passing by the foot of the hill, who proved to be the “favorite child,” seen by Lord Byron, in his memorable interview with Miss Chaworth after her marriage. That favorite child was now a blooming girl approaching to womanhood, and seems to have understood something of the character and story of this singular visitant, and to have treated her with gentle sympathy. The Little White Lady expresses, in touching terms,