lon, Manfred, and Childe Harold were finished before 1819. In 1818 he began a new style in Beppo, which he developed fully in the successive issues of Don Juan, 1819-1823. During this time a number of dramas came from him, partly historical, as his Marino Faliero, partly imaginative, as the Cain. His life had been wild and useless, but he died in trying to redeem it for the sake of the freedom of Greece. At Missolonghi he was seized with fever, and passed away in April, 1824. The position of Byron as a poet is a curious one. He is partly of the past and partly of the present. Something of the school of Pope clings to him; in Childe Harold he imitates Spenser, yet no one more completely broke away from old measures and old manners to make his poetry individual, not imitative. At first, he has no interest whatever in the human questions which were so strongly felt by Wordsworth and Shelley. His early work is chiefly narrative poetry, written that he might talk of himself and not of mankind. Nor has he any philosophy except that which centres round the problem of his own being. Cain, the most thoughtful of his productions, is in reality nothing more than the representation of the way in which the doctrines of original sin and final reprobation affected his own soul. We feel naturally great interest in this strong personality, put before us with such obstinate power, but it wearies at last. Finally it wearied himself. As he grew in thought, he escaped from his morbid self, and ran into the opposite extreme in Don Juan. It is chiefly in it that he shows the influence of the revolutionary spirit. It is written in bold revolt against all the conventionality of social morality and religion and politics. It claimed for himself and for others absolute freedom of individual act and thought in opposition to that force of society which tends to make all men after one pattern. This was the best result of his work, though the way in which it was done can scarcely be approved. He es caped still more from his diseased self when, fully seized on by the new spirit of setting men free from oppression, he sacrificed his life for the deliverance of Greece. As the poet of Nature he belongs also to the old and to the new school. We have mentioned those poets before Cowper who had less a sympathy with Nature than a sympathy with themselves as they forced her to reflect them, men who followed the vein of Rousseau, Byron's poetry of natural description is often of this class, But he also escapes from this position of the 18th century poets, and with those of the 19th looks on Nature as she is, apart from himself; and this escape is made, as in the case of his poetry of Man, in his later poems. Lastly, it is his colossal power and the ease that comes from it, in which he resembles Dryden, that marks him specially. But it is always power of the intellect rather than that of the imagination." "Scarce a page of Byron's verse even aspires to perfection; hardly a stanza will bear the minute word-by-word dissection which only brings into clearer view the delicate touches of Keats or Tennyson; his pictures with a big brush were never meant for the microscope. 'I can never recast anything. I am like the tiger; if I miss the first spring, I go grumbling back to my jungle.' No one else-except, perhaps, Wordsworth-who could write so well, could also write so ill. His best inspirations are spoilt by the interruption of incongruous commonplace. He had none of the guardian delicacy of taste, or the thirst after completeness which marks the consummate artist. Southern critics have maintained that he had a southern nature, and was in his true element on the Lido or under an Andalusian night. Others dwell on the English pride that went along with his Italian habits and Greek sympathies. The truth is, he had the power of making himself poetically everywhere at home; and this, along with the fact of all his writings being perfectly intelligible, is the secret of his European influence. This scion of a long line of lawless bloods-a Scandinavian Berserker, if there ever was one-the literary heir of the Eddas-was specially created to smite the conventionality which is the tyrant of England with the hammer of Thor, and to sear with the sarcasm of Mephistopheles the hollow hypocrisy-sham taste, sham morals, sham religion—of the society by which he was surrounded and infected, and which all but succeeded in seducing him. His greatness, as well as his weakness, lay in the fact that from boyhood battle was the breath of his being. To tell him not to fight was like telling Wordsworth not to reflect, or Shelley not to sing. His instrument is a trumpet of challenge; and he lived, as he appropriately died, in the progress of an unaccomplished campaign."-John Nichol. "His personality inspires no love like that which makes the devotees of Shelley as faithful to the man as they are loyal to the poet. His in tellect, though robust and masculine, is not of the kind to which we willingly submit. As a man, as a thinker, as an artist, he is out of harmony with us. Nevertheless, nothing can be more certain than Byron's commanding place in English literature. He is the only British poet of the nineteenth century who is also European; nor will the lapse of time fail to make his greatness clearer to his fellow-countrymen, when a just critical judgment finally dominates the fluctuations of fashion to which he has been subject."-J. A. Symonds. BIBLIOGRAPHY. BYRON.-T. Moore's Letters and Journals of; H. Giles' Lectures and Essays; Macaulay's Essays; Eng. Men of Let. Series; Ward's Anthology; Whipple's Charac. of Men of Genius, and Essays and Reviews; Howitt's Homes and Haunts of Brit. Poets; J. Morley's Crit. Miscel.; J. Paget's Paradoxes; Fras. Mag., v. 80, 1869; Quar. Rev., v. 127, 1869; West. Rev., v. 69, 1858; Ecl. Mag., Jan. and Oct., 1872; and Nov., 1880. Byron's Napoleon's Farewell. Farewell to the Land where the gloom of my Glory I have coped with the nations which dread me thus lonely- Farewell to thee, France! when thy diadem crown'd me, Oh! for the veteran hearts that were wasted In strife with the storm, when their battles were won- Farewell to thee, France!-but when Liberty rallies And yet may thy heart leap awake to my voice There are links which must break in the chain that has bound us, Then turn thee, and call on the Chief of thy choice! From Childe Harold-An August Evening in Italy. The moon is up, and yet it is not night— Where the Day joins the past Eternity; A single star is at her side, and reigns The deep-dyed Brenta, where their hues instil Which streams upon her stream, and glassed within it glows, Filled with the face of heaven, which, from afar, Comes down upon the waters; all its hues, From the rich sunset to the rising star. Their magical variety diffuse: · And now they change; a paler shadow strews Its mantle o'er the mountains; parting day Dies like the dolphin, whom each pang imbues The last still loveliest, till-'tis gone-and all is gray. From Parisina. It is the hour when from the boughs Seem sweet in every whisper'd word; Each flower the dews have lightly wet, And on the wave is deeper blue, And on the leaf a browner hue, As twilight melts beneath the moon away. But it is not to list to the waterfall That Parisina leaves her hall, And it is not to gaze on the heavenly light "Tis not for the sake of its full-blown flower. Though her ear expects as soft a tale. There glides a step through the foliage thick, And her cheek grows pale, and her heart beats quick. There whispers a voice through the rustling leaves, And her blush returns, and her bosom heaves; A moment more, and they shall meet, 'Tis past her lover's at her feet. From The Siege of Corinth. Lightly and brightly breaks away The Morning from her mantle gray, And the Noon will look on a sultry day. Hark to the trump and the drum And the mournful sound of the barbarous horn |