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II-A DREAM FUGUE.

1. Then suddenly would come a dream of far different character—a tumultuous dream, commencing with a music such as now I often heard in sleep, music of preparation and of awakening suspense. The undulations of fast-gathering tumults were like the Coronation Anthem; and, like that, gave the feeling of 5 a multitudinous movement, of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty day—a day of crisis and of ultimate hope for human nature, then suffering mysterious eclipse, and laboring in some dread extremity. Somewhere, but I knew not where-some- 10 how, but I knew not how-by some beings, but I knew not by whom—a battle, a strife, an agony, was travelling through all its stages-was evolving itself, like the catastrophe of some mighty drama, with which my sympathy was the more insupportable from deepening confusion as to its local scene, its cause, its nat- 15 ure, and its undecipherable issue. I (as is usual in dreams where, of necessity, we make ourselves central to every movement) had the power, and yet had not the power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself to will it; and yet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon 20 me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt. "Deeper than ever plummet sounded," I lay inactive. Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake, some mightier cause, than ever yet the sword had pleaded, or trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms; hurryings to and 25 fro, trepidations of innumerable fugitives; I knew not whether from the good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human faces; and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me; and but a moment allowed—and clasped hands, with heart- 30 breaking partings, and then-everlasting farewells! and, with a sigh such as the caves of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of Death, the sound was reverberated-everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again reverber ated-everlasting farewells!

2. And I awoke in struggles, and cried aloud, "I will sleep no more!"

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CHARACTERIZATION BY TAINE.'

1. Byron was a poet, but in his own fashion-a strange fashion, like that in which he lived. There were internal tempests within him, avalanches of ideas, which found issue only in writing. He

1 From the History of English Literature, by H. A. Taine.

dreams of himself and sees himself throughout. It is a boiling torrent, but hedged in with rocks.

2. No such great poet has had so narrow an imagination; he could not metamorphose himself into another. They are his own sorrows, his own revolts, his own travels, which, hardly transformed and modified, he introduces into his verses. He does not invent, he observes; he does not create, he transcribes. His copy is darkly exaggerated, but it is a copy. "I could not write upon anything," says he, "without some personal experience and foundation." You will find in his letters and note-book, almost feature for feature, the most striking of his descriptions. The capture of Ismail, the shipwreck of Don Juan, are, almost word for word, like two accounts of it in prose. If none but cockneys could attribute to him the crimes of his heroes, none but blind men could fail to see in him the sentiments of his characters. This is so true, that he has not created more than one. Childe Harold, Lara, The Giaour, The Corsair, Manfred, Sardanapalus, Cain, Tasso, Dante, and the rest, are always the same-one man represented under various costumes, in several lands, with different expressions; but just as painters do when, by change of garments, decorations, and attitudes, they draw fifty portraits from the same model.

3. He meditated too much upon himself to be enamoured of anything else. The habitual sternness of his will prevented his mind from being flexible; his force, always concentrated for effort and strained for strife, shut him up in self-contemplation, and reduced him never to make a poem save of his own heart. He lavishes upon us his opinions, recollections, angers, tastes; his poem is a conversation, a confidence, with the ups and downs, the rudeness and the freedom of a conversation and a confidence, almost like the holographic journal at which, by night, at his writing-table, he opened his heart and discharged his feelings. Never was seen in such a clear glass the birth of a lively thought, the tumult of a great genius, the inner life of a genuine poet, always impassioned, inexhaustibly fertile and creative, in whom suddenly, successively, finished and adorned, bloomed all human emotions and ideas-sad, gay, lofty, low, hustling one another, mutually impeded, like swarms of insects that go humming and feeding on flowers and in the mud. He may say what he will—

willingly or unwillingly, we listen to him; let him leap from sublime to burlesque, we leap with him. He has so much wit, so fresh a wit, so sudden, so biting, such a prodigality of knowledge, ideas, images, picked up from the four corners of the horizon, in heaps and masses, that we are captivated, transported beyond limits; we cannot dream of resisting.

4. Too vigorous, and hence unbridled-that is the word which ever recurs when speaking of Byron; too vigorous against others and himself, and so unbridled that after spending his life in braving the world, and his poetry in depicting revolt, he can only find the fulfilment of his talent and the satisfaction of his heart in a poem in arms against all human and poetic conventions. To live so, a man must be great; but he must also become deranged. There is a derangement of heart and mind in the style of Don Juan, as in Swift. When a man jests amid his tears, it is because he has a poisoned imagination. This kind of laughter is a spasm, and you see in one man a hardening of the heart, or madness; in another, excitement or disgust. Byron was exhausted, at least the poet was exhausted in him. The last cantos of Don Juan drag. The gayety became forced, the escapades became digressions; the reader began to be bored. A new kind of poetry, which he had attempted, had given way in his hands. In the drama he only obtained a powerful declamation; his characters had no life. When he forsook poetry, poetry forsook him. He went to Greece in search of action, and only found death.

THE PRISONER OF CHILLON.

[INTRODUCTION. This poem was written in 1816, shortly after Byron left England for the last time, and while he was living with the Shelleys in Switzerland.

There really was a "Prisoner of Chillon," the illustrious Bonnivard, who, for political reasons, was confined in the Castle of Chillon for six years (15301536); but, strange enough, Byron, when he wrote the piece, knew little or nothing of any actual captive. It was the mere sight of the dungeon that suggested the tragedy to his powerful imagination. When he became acquainted with the story of the real prisoner, he celebrated him in the following fine sonnet :

Eternal spirit of the chainless mind!
Brightest in dungeons, Liberty, thou art,
For there thy habitation is the heart-

The heart which love of thee alone can bind;
And when thy sons to fetters are consigned-
To fetters, and the damp vault's dayless gloom-
Their country conquers with their martyrdom,
And Freedom's fame finds wings on every wind.
Chillon thy prison is a holy place,

And thy sad floor an altar, for 'twas trod

Until his very steps have left a trace,

Worn as if thy cold pavement were a sod,

By Bonnivard!-May none those marks efface!

For they appeal from tyranny to God.

The Prisoner of Chillon is not a marked example of that style of which Byron was such an especial master, and which is, therefore, termed Byronic; but it well illustrates the poet's vigor and concentration.]

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LITERARY ANALYSIS.-1-4. Who is represented as telling the story, the actor or the author? Try if it would be as impressive if told of a third person, thus: "His hair is gray," etc.-Observe the skill with which the attention is first fixed by a reference to the most impressive characteristic of the prisoner-his premature grayness.

1-26. Of the 164 words in this stanza, nearly eighty-six per cent. are of Anglo-Saxon origin. What are the words of classical origin? — Of the 164 words, how many are other than monosyllables?

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