"And I have acted well my part,
And made my cheek belie my heart,
Returned the freezing glance she gave,
Yet felt the while _that_ woman's slave;--
Have kiss'd, as if without design,
The babe which ought to have been mine,
And show'd, alas! in each caress,
Time had not made me love the less."
"It was about the time," says Moore in his life of Lord Byron, "when he
was thus bitterly feeling and expressing the blight which his heart had
suffered from a _real_ object of affection, that his poems on an
imaginary one, 'Thyrza,' were written." He was at the same time
grieving over the loss of several of his earliest and dearest friends
the companions of his joyous school-boy hours. To recur to the
beautiful language of Moore, who writes with the kindred and kindling
sympathies of a true poet: "All these recollections of the young and
the dead mingled themselves in his mind with the image of her, who,
though living, was for him, as much lost as they, and diffused that
general feeling of sadness and fondness through his soul, which found a
vent in these poems.... It was the blending of the two affections in
his memory and imagination, that gave birth to an ideal object
combining the best features of both, and drew from him those saddest
and tenderest of love poems, in which we find all the depth and
intensity of real feeling, touched over with such a light as no reality
ever wore.
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