slip off his, and take hold of an oar, telling him I thought, being an expert swimmer, I could save him, if he would not struggle when he kept hold of me, unless we got smashed against the rocks, which were high and sharp, with an awkward surf on them at that minute. We were then about a hundred yards from the shore, and the boat in great peril. He answered me with great coolness, that he had no notion of being saved, and that I should have enough to do to save myself."*

But they succeeded, at length, in righting their frail vessel; the sail was again held, and she obeyed the helm, and they arrived safely at the village of St. Gingoux, amidst the congratulations of the inhabitants, who were not little astonished at their escape from the imminent peril in which they were placed..

Shelley's position, from his total inability to swim, was far more perilous than that of Byron; and he has given us a true picture of his feelings on this trying occasion. He says:

"I felt, in this near prospect of death, a

* Moore's Life of Byron, vol. iv. p. 148.

mixture of sensations, amongst which terror entered but subordinately. My feelings would have been less painful had I been alone; but I knew that my companion would have attempted to save me, and I was overcome with humiliation when I thought that his life might have been risked to save mine."

The accident occurring in the very spot where Julie and her lover were nearly overset, and where St. Preux was tempted to plunge with her into the lake, Lord Byron remarked:

"It would have been classical to have been lost there, but not so agreeable."

Shelley was more delighted even with St Gingoux than with Meillerie, the mountains appearing on a still grander scale, intersected as they are with deep, dark ravines, which form the beds of unseen torrents, supplied by the melting of the snows from their aërial summits.

After visiting the mouths of the Rhone, whose turbid waters mix unwillingly with those of the lake,* and hunting the many waterfalls that leap unceasingly, with their wild roar, into its bosom,

* See Nouvelle Héloïse.

they again departed for Clarens, intending first to visit the Castle of Chillon.

All day Shelley occupied himself reading the "Nouvelle Héloïse," and tracing the scenes therein so truthfully described. The mountains of La Valais, Meillerie, or Savoy, gradually mellowed down or became obscured by distance, and that dream of ideal passion which gave to each object its most touching interest, exercised its full influence over them.

The conversation which from time to time their situation naturally gave birth to, became less frequent, till, at length, all language faded from their lips, all thoughts became poetised into feelings, discovering themselves only in the silent. eloquence of the heart!

Arriving under the walls of Chillon, they visited that relic of ancient tyranny, inspecting its dungeons and towers with all the melancholy interest that naturally attaches itself to such a spot. Byron's celebrated tale of the Prisoners was the result of this visit, which thereby added another deathless poem to our literature.

From this point they were not long in reaching Clarens, a place not only famous for its own

exceeding beauty, but for the double halo which genius has cast over it.

"I never felt more strongly," says Shelley, "than on landing at Clarens, that the spirit of old times had deserted its once cherished habitation. A thousand times, thought I, have Julie and St. Preux walked on this terraced road, looking towards these mountains which I now behold; nay, treading on the ground that I now tread. From the window of our lodging our landlady pointed out, le bosquet de Julie.' At least the inhabitants of this village are impressed with an idea that the persons of that romance had an actual existence."

In the evening they walked forth into this celebrated grove.

"The hay was making under the trees; the trees themselves were aged but vigorous," says the poet, "and interspersed with younger ones destined to be their successors, and in future years, when we are dead, to afford a shade for future worshippers of nature, who love the memory of that tenderness and peace of which this was the imaginary abode."*

*Shelley's Letters.

Both were under the spell of the genius of the place-both full of emotion; and, as they walked silently through the vineyards that were once the "bosquet de Julie," Lord Byron suddenly exclaimed:

"Thank God, Polidori is not here."*

The glowing stanzas suggested by this scene, we are told, were written on the spot; but it is worthy of remark how thoroughly, by this time, Byron appears to have become imbued with the grasping idealisms of Shelley. In a note attached to these stanzas, after dwelling upon the peculiar adaptation of the place, with its surrounding scenery, to the persons and events with which it has been peopled, he says:

"But this is not all: the feeling with which all around Clarens, and the opposite rocks of Meillerie, is invested, is of a still higher and more comprehensive order than the mere sympathy with individual passion; it is a sense of the existence of love, in its most extended and sublime capacity, and of our own participation of its good and of its glory; it is the great principle of the Universe, which is there more

* Moore's Life of Byron.