had generally all the clearness and preci- is that, and how characteristic of him to sion of sculpture; indeed his clearness whose soul summer had not come, and spring serves often to disguise his depth. As ob- had for ever faded! The charge of affecscurity sometimes gives an air of mystic tation has often been brought against Byprofundity and solemn grandeur to a shal-ron's proclamations of personal woe. But low puddle, so, on the other hand, we have no one, we believe, was ever a constant and seen pools among the mountains, whose consistent hypocrite in such a matter as pellucidity made them appear less profound, misery; and we think we can argue his and where every small shining pebble was a sincerity, not merely from his personal debright liar as to the real depth of the wa-clarations, but from this fact, that all the ters; such pools are many of the poems of Byron, and, we may add, of Campbell. characters into whom he shoots his soul are unhappy. Tasso writhing in the dungeon, His dominion over the darker passions Dante prophesying evil, not to speak of his is one of the most obvious features in imaginary heroes, such as Conrad, Alp, the his poetic character. He rode in a cha- Giaour, and Childe Harold, betray in what riot drawn, if we may use the figure, by direction ran the master current of his soul; those horses described in the visions of and as the bells and bubbles upon the dark the Apocalypse," whose heads were as pool form an accurate measurement of its the heads of lions, and out of their mouths depth, so his mirth, in its wildness, reckissued fire, and smoke, and brimstone." lessness, and utter want of genuine gaiety, And supreme is his management of these tells saddest tales about the state of a heart dreadful coursers. Whatever is fier- which neither on earth nor heaven could cest and gloomiest in human nature-find aught to cheer or comfort it. whatever furnace-bosoms have been heated Besides those intensely English qualities seven times hotter by the unrestrained pas- which we have enumerated as Byron's, sions and the torrid suns of the East and the there sprung out from him, and mainly South-wherever man verges towards the through the spur of woe, a higher power animal or the fiend-wherever misan- than appeared originally to belong to his thropes have folded their arms, and taken nature. After all his faculties seemed their desperate attitude-wherever stands fully developed, and after critics and cra"the bed of sin delirious with its dread" niologists had formed their unalterable esti-wherever devours "the worm that cannot mate of them, he began, as if miraculously, sleep, and never dies"-there the melan- to grow into a loftier shape and stature, and choly muse of Byron finds a haunt. Driven compelled these same sapient judges, slowly from a home in his country, he finds it in and reluctantly, to amend their concluthe mansions of all unhappy hearts, which sions. In his "Cain," his "Heaven and open gloomily, and admit him as their Earth," and his "Vision of Judgment," tenant and their bard. To escape from he exhibited the highest form of faculty one's self is the desire of many, of all the divine-the true afflatus of the Bard. He miserable-the desire of the drunkard, of seemed to rise consciously into his own the opium-eater, of those who plunge into region; and, certainly, for gloomy granthe vortex of any dissipation, who indulge deur, and deep, desolate beauty, these proin any delicious dream-but it is the singu- ductions surpass all the writings of the larity of Byron that he uniformly escapes from himself into something worse and more miserable. His being transmigrates into a darker and more demoniac shape; he becomes an epicure even in wretchedness; he has supped full of common miseries, and must create and exhaust imaginary horrors. What infinite pity that a being so gifted, and that might have been so noble, should find it necessary perpetually to evade himself! Hence his writings abound, more than those of other authors, with lines and phrases which seem to concentrate all misery within them-with texts for misanthropes, and mottoes for the mouths of suicides. "Years all winters"-what a gasp period. Now, for the first time, men saw the Pandemonian palace of his soul fully lit, and they trembled at its ghastly splendor; and yet, curious it is to remark that those were precisely the poems which the public at first received most coldly; and those who shouted applause when he issued the two first elegant, but comparatively shallow, cantos of "Childe Harold," which were the reflection of other minds, shrank from him when he displayed the terrible riches of his own. We can only mention the materials on which Byron's genius fed-and, indeed, we must substitute the singular term-for his material was not manifold, but one: it was the history of his own heart that his genius genius, and where its power were perfect, reproduced in all his poems. His poetry he must turn round, and close in wilder, was the mirror of himself. loftier measures the sad song of "Childe Harold," which in life's summer he had begun; and strange it was to mark, in those two last cantos, not only their deepened power and earnestness, but their multiplied sorrow. He seemed to have gone away to Addison's "Mountain of Miseries," and exchanged one burden for a worse-sorrow for despair. He had fallen so low, that suicide had lost its charms; and when one falls beneath the suicide point, his misery is perfect; for his quarrel then is not with life but with being. Yet how horribly beautiful his conversation with the dust of empires-with the gigantic skeleton of Rome--with the ocean, which meets him like that simulacrum of the sea which haunted the madness of Caligula-with all the mighty miserable in the past-with those spirits which he summons from the "vasty deep," or with those ill-favored ones In considering, fourthly, the more characteristic of his works, we may divide them into his juvenile productions, his popular, and his proscribed works. His juvenile productions testified to nothing but the power of his passions, the strength of his ambition, and the uncertainty of his aims. His "Hours of Idleness" was, in one respect, the happiest hit he ever made it was fortunate enough to attract abuse from the highest critical authority in the empire, and thereby stirred his pride, and effectually roused his faculties. It required a scorching heat to hatch a Byron! In his English Bards" he proved himself rather a pugilist than a poet. It is the work of a man of Belial, "flown with insolence and wine." His popular productions were principally written when he was still a favorite son of society, the idol of drawing-rooms, and the admired, as well as observed, of all observers. "Childe Harold" is a tran"Who walk the shadow of the Vale of Death." scription of the serious and publishable part of his journal, as he travelled in Greece, He speaks to them as their equal and kinSpain, and Italy. "The Giaour" is a dred spirit. "Hell from beneath is moved powerful half-length picture of himself. to meet him at his coming; they speak, "The Bride of Abydos" is a tender and and say unto him, Art thou become like somewhat maudlin memory of Greece. unto us?" As another potentate, do those "The Corsair" was the work of one fierce" Anarchs old"-Orcus, Hades, and the fortnight, and seems to have brought one "dreaded name of Demogorgon”—admit period of his life, as well as of his popular- him into their chaotic company, and make ity, to a glitering point. In all this class him free of the privileges of their dreary of his poems we see him rather revolving realm. the memory of past, than encountering the Having thus taken a last proud farewell reality of present, misery. You have pen- of society, with all its forms and convensive sentiment rather than quick and fresh tionalities, he turned him to the task of anguish. But his war with society was pouring out his envenomed and disappointnow about to begin in right earnest; and ed spirit in works which society was as cerin prophetic anticipation of this, he wrote tain to proscribe as it was to peruse; and his "Parisina" and his "Siege of Corinth." there followed that marvellous series of These were the first great drops of the poems to which we have already referred as thunderstorm he was soon to pour down his most peculiar and powerful productions upon the world; and in the second of these, most powerful, because most sincere. particularly, there is an electric heat and a And yet the public proved how false and frenzied haste which proclaims a troubled worthless its former estimate of Byron's and distracted state of mind. In referring genius had been, by denouncing those, his his medical adviser to it as a proof of his best doings, not merely for their wickedmental sanity, he rather blundered; for al-ness, but for their artistic execution. It is though it wants the incoherence, it has the humiliating to revert to the reviews and fury, of madness. It is the most rapid and newspapers of that period, and to read the furious race he ever ran to escape from his language in which they speak of "Cain," own shadow. Then came his open breach" Sardanapalus," and the "Vision of with English society, his separation from Judgment," uniformly treating them as his lady, and his growling retreat to his miserable fallings-off from his former self Italian den. But ere yet he plunged into - beneath even the standard of his " Engthat pool, where the degradation of his lish Bards and Scotch Reviewers." "Cain" "A better farmer ne'er brushed dew from lawn, "Passion!' replied the phantom dim, There spoke the authentic shade of Junius, or at least a spirit worthy of contending with him for the honor of being the "Best Hater" upon record. we regard not only as Byron's noblest pro-j pared to the wrath of Byron expressed in duction, but as one of the finest poems in this poem. Scorn often has the effect of this or any language. It is such a work as cooling and carrying off rage--but here Milton, had he been miserable, would have" the ground burns frore and cold performs written. There is nothing in "Paradise the effect of fire." His very contempt is Lost" superior to Cain's flight with Lucifer molten; his tears of laughter, as well as of through the stars, and nothing in Shak- misery, fall in burning showers. In what speare superior to his conversations with his single lines has he concentrated the minwife Adah. We speak simply of its merits gled essence of the coolest contempt, and as a work of art-its object is worthy of all the hottest indignation! condemnation: that is, to paint a more soured and savage Manfred, engaged in a controversy, not merely with himself, but with the system of which he is one diseased and desperate member; in the unequal strife overwhelmed, and, as if the crush of Omnipotence were not enough, bringing down after him, in his fall, the weight of a brother's blood; and the object of the fable is not, as it ought to have been, to show the madness of all selfish struggle against the laws of the universe, but to more than intimate the poet's belief, that the laws which occasion such a struggle are cruel and unjust. There is an unfair distribution of misery and guilt in the story. The misery principally accrues to Cain; but a large proportion of the guilt is caught, as by a whirlwind, and flies up in the face of his Maker. The great crime of the poem is not that its hero utters blasphemies, but that you shut it with a doubt whether these blasphemies be not true. Milton wrote his great poem to "justify the ways of God to man;" Byron's object seems to be, to justify the ways of man to God—even his wildest and most desperate doings. The pleading is eloquent, but hopeless. It is the bubble on the ridge of the cataract praying not to be carried over and hurried on. Equally vain it is to struggle against those austere and awful laws, by which moments of sin expand into centuries of punishment. Yet this was Byron's own life-long struggle, and one which, like men who fight their battles o'er again in sleep, he renewed again and again in every dream of his imagination. "The Vision of Judgment," unquestionably the best abused, is also one of the best, and by no means the most profane, of his productions. It sprang from the savage disgust produced in his mind by Southey's double distilled" cant, in that poem of his on the death of George the Third-which, reversing the usual case, now lives suspended by a tow-line from its cariAll other hatred—that of Johnson —that of Burke-that of Juvenal-that of all, save Junius-is tame and maudlin com cature. And yet, mixed with the strokes of ribaldry, are touches of a grandeur which he has rarely, elsewhere, approached. His poetry always rises above itself, when painting the faded splendor wan-the steadfast gloom-the hapless magnanimity of the Prince of Darkness. With perfect ease he seems to enter into the soul, and fill up the measure and stature of the awful personage. It were unpardonable; even in a rapid review, to omit all notice of "Don Juan," which, if it bring our notion of the man to its lowest point-exalts our idea of the Poet. Its great charm is its conversational ease. How coolly, and calmly, he bestrides his Pegasus even when he is at the gallop. With what exquisitely quiet and quick transitions does he pass from humor to pathos, and make you laugh and cry at once as you do in dreams. It is less a man writing, than a man resigning his soul to his reader. To use Scott's beautiful figure the stanzas fall off as easily as the leaves from the autumnal tree; you stand under a shower of withered gold." And in spite of the endless touches of wit, the general impression is most melancholy; and not Rasselas, nor Timon, casts so deep a shadow on the thoughtful reader as the " very tragical mirth" of Don Juan. In settling, lastly, his rank as a Poet, we may simply say, that he must stand, on the whole, beneath and apart from the first class of poets, such as Homer, Dante, Milton, Shakspeare, and Goethe. Often, indeed, he seems to rush into their company, and -- to stand among them, like a daring boy be in after-time a memorial of our journey amid his seniors, measuring himself proudly-to sing the song which made it terrible with their superior stature. And possibly, and dear, in its own proud drawing-room, had he lived, he might have ultimately with those great fog-curtains floating around taken his place amongst them, for it lay into pass along the brink of its precipices him to have done this. But life was denied to snatch a fearful joy, as we leant over, him. The wild steed of his passions-like and hung down, and saw from beneath the his own "Mazeppa"-carried him furiously gleam of eternal snow shining up from its into the wilderness, and dashed him down hollows, and columns, or rather perpendicuinto premature death. And he now must lar seas of mist, streaming up upon the take his place as one at the very head of windthe second rank of poets, and arrested when he was towering up towards the first. "Like foam from the roused ocean of deep hell, Where every wave breaks on a living shore, Heaped with the damned, like pebbles—" His name has been frequently but injudiciously coupled with that of Shelley. This has arisen principally from their acci-tinged, too, here and there, on their tops, dental position. They found themselves by gleams of sunshine, the farewell beams together one stormy night in the streets, of the dying day. It was the grandest mohaving both been thrust out by the strong ment in our lives. We had stood upon arm from their homes. One had been kick- many hills-in sunshine and in shade, in ing up a row and kissing the serving-maids; mist and in thunder-but never had before, the other had been trying to reform the nor hope to have again, such a feeling of family, but in so awkward a fashion, that the grandeur of this lower universe-such a in his haste he had put out all the lustres, sense of horrible sublimity. Nay, we and nearly blown up the establishment. In question if there be a mountain in the emthat cold, desolate, moonless night, they pire, which, though seen in similar circumchanced to meet-they entered into conver-stances, could awaken the same emotions in sation-they even tried, by drawing near our minds. It is not its loftiness, though each other, to administer a little kindly that be great-nor its bold outline nor its warmth and encouragement. Men seeing savage loneliness, nor its mist-loving precithem imperfectly in the lamp-light, classed pices, but the associations which crown its them together as two dissolute and disor- crags with a "peculiar diadem "-its idenderly blackguards. And, alas, when the tification with the image of a poet, who, morning came that might have accurately amid all his fearful errors, had perhaps discriminated them, both were found lying more than any of the age's Bards, the dead in the streets. In point of pur-power of investigating all his career—yea, pose-temperament-tendency of intellect to every corner which his fierce foot ever -poetical creed-feeling-sentiments-ha-touched, or which his genius ever sungbits and character, no two men could be with profound and melancholy interest. more dissimilar. And the conjunction of We saw the name Byron written in the their names is almost as incongruous, as cloud-characters above us. We saw his though we should, in comparison, not in genius sadly smiling in those gleams of contrast, speak of Douglas Jerrold and stray sunshine which gilded the darkness Baptist Noel-Father Mathew and Profes- they could not dispel. We found an emsor Wilson-Thomas Carlyle and Andrew blem of his poetry in that flying rack, and Marshall of Kirkintilloch-Dr. Brunton and Dr. John Ritchie. of his character in those lowering precipices. We seemed to hear the wail of his We remember a pilgrimage we made some restless spirit in the wild sob of the wind, years ago to Lochnagar. As we ascended fainting and struggling up under its burden a mist came down over the hill like a veil of darkness. Nay, we could fancy that this dropped by some jealous beauty over her hill was designed as an eternal monument own fair face. At length the summit was to his name, and to image all those pecureached, though the prospect was denied liarities which make that name for ever ilIt was a proud and thrilling moment. lustrious. Not the loftiest of his country's What though darkness was all around? It poets, he is the most sharply and terribly was the very atmosphere that suited the defined. In magnitude and round comIt was dark" Lochnagar." And pleteness, he yields to many; in jagged, only think how fine it was to climb up and abrupt, and passionate projection of his clasp its cairn—to lift a stone from it, to own shadow, over the world of literature, us. scene. to none. The genius of convulsion, a dire | hills of fear, which he heard in Chimari; attraction, dwells around him, which leads even from the mountains of Greece he was many to hang over, and some to leap down carried back to Morven and his precipices. Volcanic as he is, the coldness of wintry selfishness too often collects in the hollows of his verse. He loves, too, the cloud and the thick darkness, and comes "veiling all the lightnings of his song in sorrow." So, like Byron, beside Scott and Wordsworth, does Lochnagar stand in the presence of his neighbor giants, Ben-macDhui, and Ben-y-boord, less lofty, but more fiercely eloquent in its jagged outline, reminding us of the via of the forked lightning, which it seems dumbly to mimic, projecting its cliffs like quenched batteries against earth and heaven, with the cold of snow in its heart, and with a coronet of mist round its gloomy brow. 'Lochnagar, with Ida, looked o'er Troy." Hence the severe, Dante-like, monumental, mountainous cast of his better poetry; for we firmly believe that the scenery of one's youth gives a permanent bias and coloring to the genius, the taste, and the style, i. e. if there be an intellect to receive an impulse, or a taste to catch a tone. Many, it is true, bred in cities, or amid common scenery, make up for the lack by early travel; so did Milton, Coleridge, Wilson, &c. But who may not gather, from the tame tone of Cowper's landscapes, that he had never enjoyed such opportunities? And who, in Pollok's powerful but gloomy No poet, since Homer and Ida, has thus, poem, may not detect the raven hue which everlastingly, shot his genius into the heart a sterile moorland scenery had left upon of one great mountain, identifying himself his mind? Has not, again, the glad landand his song with it. Not Horace with scape of the Howe of the Mearns, and the Soracte-not Wordsworth with Helvellyn prospect from the surmounting Hill of -not Coleridge with Mont Blanc-not Garvock, left a pleasing trace upon the Wilson with the Black Mount-not even mild pages of Beattie's Minstrel? Did not Scott with Elidons-all these are still com- Coila color the genial soul of its poet? mon property, but Lochnagar is Byron's Has not the scenery of "mine own romanown-no poet will ever venture to sing it tic town" made much of the prose and poeagain. In its dread circle none durst walk try of Sir Walter Scott what it is? So,is but he. His allusions to it are not nume-it mere fancy which traces the stream of rous, but its peaks stood often before his Byron's poetry in its light and its darkeye a recollection of its grandeur served ness, its bitterness and its brilliance, to this more to color his line, than the glaciers of smitten rock in the wilderness-to the cliffs the Alps, the cliffs of Jura, or the thunder of Lochnagar? It is now about six months ago that the unite on one common neutral ground of thinking portion of the British public were brotherly love, and to form what was termstartled by the announcement of a great ed, more ambitiously than wisely, an moral and political phenomenon. What" Irish Party." Peers, landowners, magisseven centuries of all sorts of government trates, and M.P.'s, clericals and laymen, -patriarchal, martial, clerical, self-govern- Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Presbying, and imperial, had been unable to terians, met and passed magnanimous resobring to pass in Ireland, a few months of lutions to sink all party and political feelfamine and its consequences were to effect ings and personal prejudices, and devote as by a miracle. Now, for the first time themselves to the good of their country. in the history of Ireland, were men of all The world looked on, astonished; for now ranks, classes, religions, and parties, to that these patriots did agree, their unani |