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"Many studious and contemplative years, altogether spent in the search of religious and civil knowledge" is his own description of the period. "You make many inquiries as to what I am about;" he writes to Diodati "what am I thinking of? Why, with God's help, of immortality! Forgive the word, I only whisper it in your ear! Yes, I am pluming my wings for a flight."
If you recall the pure, wild fragrance of the heath we gathered on our return from the Villa Diodati, the flower whose tints of black and rose you praised so warmly, you can fancy how this woman could be elegant though remote from the social world, natural in expression, fastidious in all things which became part of herself, in short, like the heath of mingled colors.
Mary notes the books they read, and their visits in the evening to Diodati, where she became accustomed to the sound of Byron's voice, with Shelley's always the answering echo, for she was too awed and timid to speak much herself. These conversations caused her, subsequently, when hearing Byron's voice, to feel a sad want for "the sound of a voice that is still."
By nature a Bohemian, somehow made into a Yorkshire mill-owner; a strong, active, nobly featured man, who dressed as no one in the factory regions ever did before or probably ever will again his usual appearance suggesting the common notion of a bushranger; an artist to the core; a purchaser of pictures by unknown men who had a future at the sale of his collection three Robert Cheeles got into the hands of dealers, all of them now the boasted possessions of great galleries; a passionate lover of music he had been known to make the journey to Paris merely to hear Diodati sing; finally, in common rumour a profligate whom no prudent householder would admit to the society of his wife and daughters.
But to proceed: upon the same side of the lake, Gibbon, Bonnivard, Bradshaw, and others mark, as it were, the stages for our progress; whilst upon the other side there is one house, built by Diodati, the friend of Milton, which has contained within its walls, for several months, that poet whom we have so often read together, and who if human passions remain the same, and human feelings, like chords, on being swept by nature's impulses shall vibrate as before will be placed by posterity in the first rank of our English Poets.
Sunt, quos curriculo pulverem Olympicum, and if we take into consideration that Juror says in the same scene: And when thy swelling vents amain, Then Pisces be thy sporting chamberlain, it is not asserting too much that these are manifest hits at Florio, who, to please his Maecenas, tries with Dr. Diodati, his 'guide-fish' to capture the 'whale' in the 'rocke rough ocean.
Amid the advancing infirmities of age, the isolation from friends, and the loss of his daughter, Galileo once again sought consolation in hard work. He commenced his famous dialogue on Motion. Gradually, however, his sight began to fail, and blindness was at last added to his other troubles. On January 2nd, 1638, he writes to Diodati:
Contrast with this pandemonium of Leipsic and Paternoster Row the sublime picture of our Milton in his early retirement at Horton, when, musing over his coming flight to the epic heaven, practising his pinions, as he tells Diodati, he consumed five years of solitude in reading the ancient writers "Et totum rapiunt me, mea vita, libri." Who now reads the ancient writers?
Poole says that it was 'a house so called, either, first, because it was built in the mountain and forest of Lebanon, for recreation in summer time; but generally held to have been near Jerusalem; or rather, secondly, from some resemblance it had with Lebanon for its pleasant shades and groves. Diodati considers it the same with Solomon's palace, but called the house of Lebanon by reason of the groves planted about it; or of the great number of cedar columns brought from Lebanon, and used in its construction.
In reading history it was his aim to get at a conspectus of the general current of affairs rather than to study minutely a special period. He tells Diodati in September, 1637, that he has studied Greek history continuously, from the beginning to the fall of Constantinople.
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