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He gained esteem where it was worth the most; And certainly Aurora had renewed In him some feelings he had lately lost Or hardened,--feelings which, perhaps ideal, Are so divine that I must deem them real:-- The love of higher things and better days; The unbounded hope and heavenly ignorance Of what is called the world and the world's ways; The moments when we gather from a glance More joy than from all future pride or praise, Which kindled manhood, but can ne'er entrance The heart in an existence of its own Of which another's bosom is the zone.
And full of sentiments sublime as billows Heaving between this world and worlds beyond, Don Juan, when the midnight hour of pillows Arrived, retired to his.'.

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In all these descriptions of a spiritual unworldly nature acting on the spiritual and unworldly part of his own nature, every one who ever knew Lady Byron intimately must have recognised the model from which he drew, and the experience from which he spoke, even though nothing was further from his mind than to pay this tribute to the woman he had injured, and though before these lines, which showed how truly he knew her real character, had come one stanza of ribald, vulgar caricature, designed as a slight to her:-- 'There was Miss Millpond, smooth as summer's sea, That usual paragon, an only daughter, Who seemed the cream of equanimity 'Till skimmed; and then there was some milk and water; With a slight shade of blue, too, it might be, Beneath the surface: but what did it matter?
Love's riotous; but marriage should have quiet, And, being consumptive, live on a milk diet.' The result of Byron's intimacy with Miss Milbanke and the enkindling of his nobler feelings was an offer of marriage, which she, though at the time deeply interested in him, declined with many expressions of friendship and interest.