" Similarly,
when, in the course of the following year, the fierce old man at Newstead
died, and the young lord's name was called at school with "Dominus"
prefixed to it, his emotion was so great that he was unable to answer, and
burst into tears.
Belonging to this period is the somewhat shadowy record of a childish
passion for a distant cousin slightly his senior, Mary Duff, with whom he
claims to have fallen in love in his ninth year. We have a quaint picture
of the pair sitting on the grass together, the girl's younger sister
beside them playing with a doll. A German critic gravely remarks, "This
strange phenomenon places him beside Dante." Byron himself, dilating on
the strength of his attachment, tells us that he used to coax a maid to
write letters for him, and that when he was sixteen, on being informed, by
his mother, of Mary's marriage, he nearly fell into convulsions. But in
the history of the calf-loves of poets it is difficult to distinguish
between the imaginative afterthought and the reality. This equally applies
to other recollections of later years. Moore remarks--"that the charm of
scenery, which derives its chief power from fancy and association, should
be felt at an age when fancy is yet hardly awake and associations are but
few, can with difficulty he conceived.
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