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In this low vale, the promise of the year,
Serene, thou openest to the nipping gale,
Unnoticed and alone,

Thy tender elegance.

So virtue blooms, brought forth amid the storms
Of chill adversity; in some lone walk

Of life she rears her head,
Obscure and unobserved;

While every bleaching breeze that on her blows
Chastens her spotless purity of breast,

And hardens her to bear

Serene the ills of life.

CONCLUDING STANZAS OF THE CHRISTIAD."

Thus far have I pursued my solemn theme,
With self-rewarding toil, thus far have sung
Of godlike deeds, far loftier than beseem

The lyre which I in early days have strung;
And now my spirit's faint, and I have hung
The shell, that solaced me in saddest hour,

On the dark cypress! and the strings which rung
With Jesus' praise, their harpings now arc o'er,

Or when the breeze comes by, moan, and are heard no more.

And must the harp of Judah sleep again?
Shall I no more reanimate the lay?

Oh! thou who visitest the sons of men,

Thou who dost listen when the humble pray,

One little space prolong my mournful day!

One little lapse suspend thy last decree!

I am a youthful traveller in the way,

And this slight boon would consecrate to thee,
Ere I with death shake hands, and smile that I am free.

LORD BYRON.

(1788-1824).

On the earlier years of the present century burst like a thunderbolt the genius of Lord Byron. Differing from every preceding type in English literature, he came to found a new school, and to suggest new standards of taste. The epics of Southey, the ballads of Wordsworth, the odes of Coleridge, and the Gothic lays of Scott, were paled before the terrible beauty of the new meteor that dazzled all eyes. No sooner did Byron's great poem begin its advent, than all Britain was at his feet. The idolatry was perpe

tuated, not only by the successive appearances of his varied works, but by the mystery of his life and his misfortunes.

The poet was born in London in 1788. His father was Captain John Byron, nephew to the existing head of the family; his mother was Miss Gordon of Gight, an Aberdeenshire heiress, whom Captain Byron had married purely for her fortune. Mrs Byron was a woman of violent and capricious passions, with an infatuated and ill-regulated attachment to her husband, who soon ruined her fortune, and reduced her to the necessity of retiring with her infant son to Aberdeen, on a small annuity, which her profligate husband farther narrowed by his exactions. When there remained no more to extort from his wife, he finally left her, and died on the continent. The young George received the usual education which a Scottish city can furnish. As a child, he was bold and wayward, but ardently affectionate. His great personal beauty was marred by the deformity in his right foot that caused his lameness through life: allusions to this, in which his injudicious mother indulged herself in her stormy moods,' would throw him into ecstacies of anger. By the death of his eccentric grand-uncle in 1798, George, unfortunately perhaps for the development of his future character, succeeded to the family honours and estates at the age of eleven years. His proud mother immediately removed to Newstead Abbey, the family seat in Nottinghamshire.3 During his residence in Dr Glennie's institution at Dulwich, as much with a view to the cure of his foot as to education, bis guardian Lord Carlisle and the doctor were tormented by the perpetual interference of his mother.* He afterwards went to Harrow, and thence to Cambridge. At school and at the university he was the plague of his instructors, by his utter neglect of discipline and of study, at least of that which discipline prescribes. From his childhood he was a voracious reader. Before his eighth year he had perused, under the care of his religious nurse, the whole Old Testament; and the catalogue in Moore's Life (vol. i. p. 95, 4to Ed.), of the books he had read before the age of fifteen, presents an amazing amount of industry, and accounts for the facile mastery he held over the English language. The Cambridge vacations he spent partly near Newstead, which had been let, and chiefly, in different places, with his mother, whose alternate fits of affection and violence, which her son took a malicious pleasure in provoking, must have deeply exasperated the worse parts of his character. He often narrowly escaped the poker and the tongs; on one occasion, after a violent quarrel, mother and son went each secretly to a chemist's shop to ascertain if the other had been to purchase poison. His attachment to his beautiful cousin, Mary Chaworth, a little before this period, shed a gleam of sunshine on the poet's existence. Had this attachment proved fortunate, his destiny might have been very different ; but the capricious beauty slighted the almost worshipping affection of the

1 He alludes to these scenes in the " Deformed Transformed:"-
"Bertha. Out, hunchback!
Arnold.

I was born so, mother!"

2 For the singular character of this Lord Byron, see Moore's Life, vol. i.

3 The poet more than once records his affectionate recollections of his early life in Scotland; for instance, in "Lochnagar," and the verses on "Auld Lang Syne" in Don

Juan.

4 During one of his noisy altercations with her, Dr Glennie had the pain of hearing one of Byron's companions remark to him, "Byron, your mother is a fool," to which he gloomily replied, "I know it."

5 Another feature of his school and university life was the almost feminine ardour of his friendships: Moore, indeed, remarks many feminine peculiarities in the fitful features of Byron's mind, his violent likings and dislikes, capricious sullenness, and sudden passions of tears. He shared with more than one of our great poets a profound detestation of the English system of public education.

Miss C.'s father had been killed in a duel by Byron's grand-uncle.

"lame boy." Fate and his own uncontrolled passions were against the unhappy poet; libertinism was commencing its corruption, scepticism was unhinging the principles of right and wrong in his moral and intellectual nature: an unquiet home, and a rejected love on the threshold of youth, are not things calculated to clothe the world with attractive hues in the eyes of any one, and much less in those of a haughty and unquiet spirit like Byron's. His earliest publication (1807), the "Hours of Idleness," called forth the merciless and somewhat coarse criticism of the Edinburgh Review (January 1808), which subsequently elicited the first specimen of the noble poet's real powers, in the satire " English Bards," &c. Restless and misan. thropic, satiated with the dissolute gaieties of London, embarrassed, besides, in circumstances (for, independently of his own extravagance, his grand-uncle had done what he could to dilapidate his successor's heritage), Byron in 1809 resolved to travel. He visited, accompanied by his friend Mr Hobhouse, Portugal, Spain, Greece, and Asia Minor. He returned in 1811 to receive his mother's last sigh. The next three years were signalized by the appearance in rapid succession of the first two cantos of Childe Harold," "The Giaour," "The Bride of Abydos," "The Corsair," and "Lara." His reputation was now at its height; he was the idol of English society. This blaze of fame conferred no happiness; embarrassed in circumstances, with a home without a tie of affection, he determined to marry. The lady he selected for his bride was Miss Milbanke, daughter of Sir Ralph Milbanke,3 a Northumberland baronet. This marriage was peculiarly unfortunate: after the birth of her child, Lady Byron left her husband, and, by the advice of her relatives, refused to return, the alleged cause being a conviction of Lord Byron's insanity. When the desertion took place, the poet's affairs were in ruins; repeated executions had happened in his house. Whatever or wherever may have been the fault, his nature was rent by the deepest grief and anger. England was no longer the place for his desolate spirit, and he again sought refuge for his misery in foreign travel (1816). Bearing the outward mask of pride, indifference, and gaiety, he traversed Belgium, Switzerland (where he formed the acquaintance of Shelley), and resided for a number of years in various parts of Italy, chiefly at Venice. His time seems to have been passed in a series of heartless libertine intrigues and dissipation, intermixed with literary labour. But a better sphere was opening up for the exertion of his energies. The Greek insurrection had commenced in 1821, and had roused the sympathies of all Europe. Ardently interested in the cause of a country whose shores have been a second time rendered classic by his muse, he generously determined to devote himself and his fortune to her liberties. He was received by the nation with unbounded enthusiasm ; but, ere he could enjoy the opportunity of redeeming his past life, by a career worthy of his great qualities, he was cut off by a fever, caught in consequence of his exertions, and died at Missolonghi

1 With what depth of feeling he lamented this result may be seen in the "Dream," and in the verses beginning, "Well, thou art happy," &c.

2 Of this poem Byron boasts that 14,000 copies were sold in one day. The poet had started with the generous determination to accept no money for his works, but to dispose of their copyrights in gifts to his friends. This resolution his prudence and his necessities soon induced him to abandon. The sums he received for his poems amounted, accordto the statement of Mr Murray his publisher, to upwards of L.15,000.

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The family changed their name to Noel, in compliance with the will of Lord Wentworth, and in compliment to the property bequeathed by him."-Moore.

4 Ada, now Countess of Lovelace.

5 See the expression of his feeling in the verses "Fare thee well," &c., and in the "Sketch," a waste of indignation on a thing unworthy of his anger. The poet himself always professed ignorance of any real cause of the separation.

in 1824, at the early age of thirty-seven. His death was mourned by the Greeks as a national calamity.'

The peculiar combination of qualities that in general constitute poetical genius is a curse rather than a blessing when unregulated by right moral or intellectual principle. Byron's nervous temperament was so trembingy sensitive, that the slightest touch vibrated through his passions. His best affections were the source of misery; he seemed to fling them from him in anger and disdain. Sir Walter Scott expressed his gratitude that, if ungifted with the majestic genius of his friend, he was yet uncursed with the mental evils that were its dark concomitants. Byron was inspired, to use the language of Goethe," by the genius of pain :" his spirit, not purified, was indurated to superhuman vigour in the furnace of his self-caused sorrows. His fate was that of the Eastern insect, impaled, that its tortures may fling forth more vivid flashes of its nervous and living light. And yet, it might be asked, was this alleged anguish really endured? Is it really true that all was green and wildly fresh without, but worn and gray beneath?" Did" the smile that sorrow fain would wear" actually mock" an under-lurking woe "like roses o'er a sepulchre ?" Since Mr Moore's biography has withdrawn the veil of mystery in which Lord Byron delighted to shroud himself-since the disclosure of the heartless career of his Italian life,-much of the romantic interest that invested the poet must have disappeared. The series of his letters, and his diary, exhibit anything but a mind tortured amidst the storms of an unhappy idiosyncrasy. His contempt of mankind ends in a restless nervousness respecting the world's opinions, and an almost mean desire of popularity; his reckless generosity in a little passion for accumulation.2 Byron's biographical character is often strangely at variance with that would-be internal one which he leaves us to infer from his writings. His very scepticism wants principle; he presumes to doubt or disbelieve, yet will not examine to judge, yet will not weigh evidence. In summing up the circumstances which led to the evolution of Lord Byron's genius, they may nearly all be enumerated thus:an extremely irregular education; the injudicious moral management of a parent utterly incapable of directing aright even a common mind; a selfishness and obstinacy of purpose existing singularly in a soul theoretically alive to every generous and noble impulse; passions and emotions, good and evil, as excitable and capricious in their wayward variation as the ocean waters; an intellect of great power, but of power exhibited remarkably only when electrified by the touch of imagination, and a consequent false philosophy of men and things.

The peculiarities of his mind are deeply imprinted on his works. The reader never loses sight of the poet even in his dramas. In all his large poems, both men and women are pictures of himself. This has been alleged as the chief cause of his failure in dramatic writing. But no poet ever produced a series of pieces which the reader peruses with an interest so powerful and thrilling. Mystery, pride, sternness, stoicism, generosity, fearlessness, tenderness, are the elements out of which he moulds his characters. They are associated with scenes of Alpine desolation, or of oriental luxury

1 His body was brought to England, and, on account of his life and opinions, was refused admission to Westminster Abbey by the church authorities: he reposes with his ancestors in the church of the village of Hucknall, near Newstead.

2 His fortune, however, was nobly devoted ultimately to Greece.

3 He has recorded his early dislike of the New Testament. He appears to have been highly capable of mere emotional devotion.

He has quoted of himself Ovid's

"Video meliora proboque Deteriora sequor."-Met. vii. 20.

T and beauty: their adventures and situations are singularly wild and romantic. Their sentiments are expressed in language, energetic often as thunder in its strength, or soft and musical as the Delphian lute in its mournful or playful melody.

A principle of vivid contrast runs through all Byron's poetry, and is one great source of the hold with which his writings grasp our interest. It not only pervades the general structure of the pieces, but is the pivot on which the power of many of his individual pictures turns. He is fond of delineating eloquently and brightly glory, ambition, affection, prosperity, all that forms the fairest colouring in the hues of human destiny, only to startle the soul rudely with the dark exhibition of their opposites, ruin, disappointment, hate, death; an expression of solemn or affecting emotion he sometimes turns off with a sneer or a jest.

The use of this antithetic principle as a means of producing effect and interest cannot perhaps be defended by the rules of right criticism; not at least when employed to the extent, and in the peculiar manner in which Byron wields it. It becomes theatrical; and resembles that trick of art in painting which, by throwing a figure beyond the linear boundary of the picture, attempts to produce a deceptive relief. In like manner, in Byron's compositions, the taste is apt to mistake an antithesis for truth of poetical conception, and vigour of poetical expression.

The plan of" Childe' Harold" is an anomaly in poetical science, but the effect is magnificent-a panoramic view of the scenes, persons, and events which form the beacon-towers on the ocean of time. Few poems contain an assemblage of objects so grand and attractive in interest as the pictures in Childe Harold. In the succession of the contemplations which it presents, the want of a regularly-constructed fable is not felt. The poet was right to fling away the fetters with which his own egotism had at first invested the plan. On this composition he evidently embarked his whole mind and heart; his dark spirit overshadows every scene with its wings.

The works of Byron which we have not mentioned are the "Siege of Corinth," "Mazeppa," "The Prisoner of Chillon," Translations," Hebrew Melodies," &c. : "Don Juan," "Beppo," &c., exemplify his genius in its lighter and sarcastic moods, and display a miraculous power of moulding the English language. His dramas are, "Manfred," " Faliero," "The Foscari," "Sardanapalus," " Werner," &c.

STANZAS FOR MUSIC.

There's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away,
When the glow of early thought declines in feeling's dull decay;
"Tis not on youth's smooth cheek the blush alone, which fades so

fast,

But the tender bloom of heart is gone, ere youth itself be past.

Then the few, whose spirits float above the wreck of happiness,
Are driven o'er the shoals of guilt or ocean of excess :
The magnet of their course is gone, or only points in vain
The shore to which their shiver'd sail shall never stretch again.

1 Childe is an old word applied to knights; the archaism is intended to be in accordance with the old Spenserian stanza, and the antique aspect which the poet at first projected giving to the language.

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