The lives of Byron and Shelley during the next six years were destined to be curiously blent.

Both were to seek in Italy an exile-home; while their friendship was to become one of the most interesting facts of English literary history.

The influence of Byron upon Shelley, as he more than once acknowledged, and as his wife plainly perceived, was, to a great extent, depressing.

For Byron's genius and its fruits in poetry he entertained the highest possible opinion.

He could not help comparing his own achievement and his fame with Byron's; and the result was that in the presence of one whom he erroneously believed to be the greater poet, he became inactive.
Shelley, on the contrary, stimulated Byron's productive faculty to nobler efforts, raised his moral tone, and infused into his less subtle intellect something of his own philosophical depth and earnestness.