Читать книгу Journal of a Residence in America - Fanny Kemble - Страница 10

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On my back all day: mercy, how it ached too! the ship reeled about like a drunken thing. I lay down, and began reading Byron's life. As far as I have gone (which is to his leaving England) there is nothing in it but what I expected to find—the fairly-sown seeds of the after-harvest he bore. Had he been less of an egotist, would he have been so great a poet?—I question it. His fury and wrath at the severe injustice of his critics reminds me, by the by, of those few lines in the Athenæum, which I read the other day, about poetical shoemakers, dairy-maids, ploughmen, and myself. After all, what matters it?—"If this thing be of God," the devil can't overthrow it; if it be not, why the printer's devil may. What can it signify what is said? If truth be truth to the end of reckoning, why, that share of her, if any, which I possess, must endure when recorded as long as truth endures. I almost wonder Byron was moved by criticism: I should have thought him at once too highly armed, and too self-wrapped, to care for it;—however, if a wasp's sting have such virtue in it, 'tis as well it should have been felt as keenly as it was.—Ate nothing but figs and raisins; in the evening some of our gentlemen came into our cabin, and sat with us; I, in very desperation and sea-sickness, began embroidering one of my old nightcaps, wherein I persevered till sleep overtook me.