"The 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 transcription of the serious and publishable part of his jour nal, as he travelled in Greece, Spain, and Italy. "The Giaour" is a powerful half-length picture of himself. Bride of Abydos" is a tender and somewhat maudlin memory of Greece. "The Corsair " was the work of one fierce fortnight, and seems to have brought one period of his life, as well as of his popularity, to a glittering point. In all this class of his poems we see him rather revolving the memory of past, than encountering the reality of present, misery You have pensive sentiment rather than quick and fresh anguish. But his war with society was now about to begin in right earnest; and in prophetic anticipation of this, he wrote his "Parisina" and his "Siege of Corinth." These were the first great drops of the thunder-storm he was soon to pour down upon the world; and the second of them, in its heat and frenzied haste, proclaims a troubled and distracted state of mind. In referring his medical advisers to it as a proof of his mental insanity, he rather blundered; for although it wants the incoherence, it has the fury of madness. It is the most rapid and furious race he ever ran to escape from himself. Then came his open breach with English society, his separation from his lady, and his growling retreat to his Italian den. But ere yet he plunged into that pool, where the degradation of his genius, and where its power was perfect, he must turn round, and close in wilder, 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 "who walk the shadow of the vale of death." He speaks to them as their equal and kindred spirit. "Hell from beneath is moved to meet him at his coming: they speak, and say unto him, Art thou become like unto us?" As another potentate, do those "Anarchs old "—Orcus, Hades, and the "dreaded name of Demogorgon "-admit him into their chaotic company, and make him free of the privileges of their dreary realm. Having thus taken a last proud farewell of society, with all its forms and conventionalities, he turned him to the task of pouring out his envenomed and disappointed spirit in works which society was as certain to proscribe as it was to peruse; and there followed that marvellous series of poems to which we have already referred as his most peculiar and powerful productions-most powerful, because most sincere. And yet the public proved how false and worthless its former estimate of Byron's genius had been, by denouncing those, his best doings, not merely for their wickedness, but for their artistic execution. It is humiliating to revert to the reviews and newspapers of that period, and to read the language in which they speak of Cain," "Sardanapalus," and the "Vision of Judgment," uniformly treating them as miserable fallings-off from his former self-beneath even the standard of his " English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." "Cain " we regard not only as Byron's noblest production, but as one of the finest poems in this or any language. It is such a work as Milton, had he been miserable, would have written There is nothing in Paradise Lost" superior to Cain's flight with. Lucifer through the stars, and 'nothing in Shakspeare superior to his conversations with his wife Adah. We speak simply of its merits as a work of art-its object is worthy of all 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 sprung from the savage disgust produced in his mind by Southey's "double-distilled" cant, in that poem of his on the death of George III. -which, reversing the usual case, now lives suspended by a tow-line from its caricature. All other hatred-that of Johnson-that of Burke-that of Juvenal-that of all, save Junius-is tame and maudlin compared to the wrath of Byron expressed in this poem. Scorn often has the effect of cooling and carrying off rage-but here "the ground burns frore, and cold performs the effect of fire." His very contempt is molten; his tears of laughter, as well as of misery, fall in burning showers. In what single lines has he concentrated the mingled essence of the coolest contempt, and the hottest indignation! "A better farmer ne'er brushed dew from lawn. "When the gorgeous coffin was laid low, "Passion!' replied the phantom dim, I loved my country and I hated him.'" 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. 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 be placed, 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 amid his seniors, measuring himself proudly with their superior stature. And, possibly, had he lived, he might have ultimately taken his place amongst them, for it was in his, power to have done this. But life was denied him. The wild steed of his passions-like his own "Mazeppa "-carried him furiously into the wilderness, and dashed him into premature death. And he now must take his place as one at the very head of the second rank of poets, and arrested when he was towering up towards the first. His name has been frequently but injudiciously coupled with that of Shelly. This has arisen principally from their accidental position. They found themselves together one stormy night in the streets, having both been thrust out by the strong arm from their homes. One had been kicking up a row and kissing the servant-maids; the other had been trying to rouse the family, but in so awkward a fashion, that in his haste he had put out all the lustres, and nearly blown up the establishment. In that cold, desolate, moonless night, they chanced to meet-they entered into conversation-they even tried, by drawing near each other, to administer a little kindly warmth and encouragement. Men seeing them imperfectly in the lamp-light, classed them together as two dissolute and disorderly blackguards. And, alas, when the morning came that might have accurately discriminated them, both were found lying dead in the streets. In point of purpose-temperament-tendency of intellect-political creed-feeling-sentiments-habits and character, no two men could be more dissimilar. ment. We remember a pilgrimage we made some years ago to Lochnagar. As we ascended, a mist came down over the hill, like a veil dropped by some jealous beauty over her own fair face. At length the summit was reached, though the prospect was denied us. It was a proud and thrilling moWhat though darkness was all around? It was the very atmosphere that suited the scene. It was "dark Lochnagar." And only think how fine it was to climb up and clasp its cairn to lift a stone from it, to be in aftertime a memorial of our journey-to sing the song which made it glorious and dear, in its own proud drawing-room, with those great fog-curtains floating around-to pass along the brink of its precipices-to snatch a fearful joy, as we leant over, and hung down, and saw from beneath the gleam of eternal snow shining up from its hollows, and columns, or rather perpendicular seas of mist, streaming up upon the wind |