Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/375

. Byron despised women, first and last; despised the sexualism of his epoch, while he made it so much a part of his outer, animal life. His own words as to the feeble hold that women had over him are conclusive.

On the other hand, how enduring and explicit were Byron's numerous friendships!—ties that were, to use his phrase, "friendships that were passions!" His journals and letters tell us not only of Lord Clare—that Clare so immeasureably loved by Byron,—Clare, whose name Byron could not hear spoken his life through without nervous excitement overmastering him, and whom to meet, even for a few moments, long years after their early life, was unmanning to him; but of Wingfield, Long, and the choir-boy Eddleston. There were many others. These were loved, as he defines it, with a vehemence not felt in even his deep affection for such friends as Hobhouse, Moore, Shelley, and so on. In previously alluding to Byron's boyhood, we have mentioned his passionate intimacy with a village-lad. But Eddleston has a clearer history. Eddleston was a handsome young chorister, who caught Byron's fancy and heart at the University. Byron writes of him, later:—"His voice first attracted my attention, his countenance fixed it, and his manners attached him to me forever. I certainly love him more than any human being, and neither time nor distance have had the least effect on my (in general) changeable disposition. In short we shall put Lady E. Butler and Miss Ponsonby to the blush, Pylades and Orestes out of countenance, and want nothing but a catastrophe, like Nisus. and Euryalus to give Jonathan and David the go-by. He certainly is perhaps more attached to me than even I am in return. During the whole of my residence at Cambridge we met every day, summer and winter, without passing one tiresome moment, and separated each hour with increasing reluctance" … This is no ordinary college-friendship from Byron, who already had little to learn in discriminating the