Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/376

 colours of sexual emotions. Never did Byron write of d woman in such a tone, in all his letters. His using the names of two women—the celebrated "Ladies of Llangollen"—is suggestive. Eddleston was far below Byron in social grade; of no particular intellectual gifts; and of highly musical temperament. He died untimely in 1811, in his twenty-second year, to Byron's unspeakable grief. The letter which Byron wrote to a lady, at the time, asking her to send back a certain little souvenir of Eddleston in her possession, refers to the same theme; as does a poem on "The Token". Another friend of Byron's young manhood, for whom a peculiar sentiment hovers between uranistic and dionistic attachment, was Lord Dorset. "At school," writes Byron, "I was passionately attached to him;" and he adds that although years had cooled the ardour "there was a time in my life when this event would have broken my heart." The account that Byron set down of his emotion in his last hasty meeting with Lord Clare, unexpectedly, (on a journey), is a witness to the enduring nature of their bond. Another passionate sentiment for a youth, in which homosexualism is even clearer suggested, occurred in Greece, in 1811. Byron's mood invited such an affair. The object was a young French-Greek boy, of great beauty, named Nicolo Giraud. Giraud was a model for the Italian painter Lusieri. Not only for the moment was Byron wholly free from any feminine preoccupation, but his heart was reactive against the sex. He saw young Giraud, found him "the most beautiful being I have ever beheld", and took possession of the youth with characteristic impetuosness. Moore makes a nervous allusion to the affair, as expressing interest an in Giraud "similar to those which had inspired Byron's early attachment to the cottage-boy near Newstead, and to the young chorister (Eddleston) at Cambridge;" Young Giraud completely dominated the poet. Byron made a testament at this date, leaving practically his whole fortune to Giraud—the first article of the document! In the poet's