Emelie Palamon LORD BYRON. Yclothed was she, fresh for to devise. Her yellow hair was braided in a tress She walketh up and down, where as her list:" And then, as Dryden has it: "At every turn she made a little stand, And thrust among the thorns her lily hand." Madame Guiccioli, who was at that time about twenty, was handsome and lady-like, with an agreeable manner, and a voice not partaking too much of the Italian fervour to be gentle. She had just enough of it to give her speaking a grace. None of her graces appeared entirely free from art; nor, on the other hand, did they betray enough of it to give you an ill opinion of her sincerity and good-humour. I was told, that her Romagnese dialect was observable; but to me, at that time, all Italian in a lady's mouth was Tuscan pearl; and she trolled it over her lip, pure or not, with that sort of conscious grace, which seems to belong to the Italian language as a matter of right. I amused her with speaking bad Italian out of Ariosto, and saying speme for speranza; in which she good naturedly found something pleasant and pellegrino; keeping all the while that considerate. countenance, for which a foreigner has so much reason to be grateful. Her hair was what the poet has described, or rather blond, with an inclination to yellow; a very fair and delicate yellow at all events, and within the limits of the poetical. She had regular features, of the order properly called handsome, in distinction to prettiness or to piquancy; being well proportioned to one another, large rather than otherwise, but without coarseness, and more harmonious than interesting. Her nose was the handsomest of the kind I ever saw; and I have known her both smile very sweetly, and look intelligently, when Lord Byron has said something kind to her. I should not say, however, that she was a very intelligent person. Both her wisdom and her want of wisdom were on the side of her feelings, in which there was doubtless mingled a good deal of the self-love natural to a flattered beauty. She wrote letters in the style of the "Academy of Compliments ;" and made plentiful use, at all times, of those substitutes for address and discourse, which flourished in England at the era of that polite compilation, and are still in full bloom in Italy. "And evermore She strewed a mi rallegro after and before." In a word, Madame Guiccioli was a kind of buxom parlour-boarder, compressing herself. artificially into dignity and elegance, and fancying she walked, in the eyes of the whole world, a heroine by the side of a poet. When I saw her at Monte-Nero, she was in a state of excitement and exaltation, and had really something of this look. At that time also she looked no older than she was; in which respect a rapid and very singular change took place, to the surprise of every body. In the course of a few months she seemed to have lived as many years. It was most likely in that interval that she discovered she had no real hold on the affections of her companion. The portrait of her by Mr. West, "In Magdalen's loose hair and lifted eye," is flattering upon the whole; has a look of greater delicacy than she possessed; but it is also very like, and the studied pretension of the attitude has a moral resemblance. Being |