misery that seeks neither hope nor alleviation. All weak emotions are discarded from its dark catalogue of crime and suffering. It deifies self-will, and is impatient of imperfection, not of good, but of evil. The bonds of clay, that check the energies of the mind, it feels as a limitation and a curse. It plucks its illustrations from those aspects of nature, where life flourishes in desolation, and is triumphant over all obstacles to its growth and strength:

"From their nature will the tannen grow Loftiest on loftiest and least sheltered rocks, Rooted in barrenness, where naught below

Of soil supports them 'gainst the Alpine shocks

Of eddying storms; yet springs the trunk, and mocks
The howling tempest, till its height and frame

Are worthy of the mountains from whose blocks

Of bleak, gray granite into life it came,

the mind may grow the same."

And grew a giant tree ; The answer of this misanthropy to all entreaties for repentance is, in the moody phrase of Manfred, "It is too late." It can exist without happiness. Cain asks Lucifer, in reference to the rebel angels,

But if happiness be not needed, neither is there a sting to death, though the soul be laden with unrepented sins. The last words that Manfred utters, as he turns his glazing eyes to the man of God by his side, are the most awful in the drama :

"Old man! 't is not so difficult to die."

That is, hell can be borne !

Suffering, in natures thus lifted from the mass, and strong in the heroism of despair, needs no aid from piety and human feeling, but can be endured unshrinkingly by the mind," itself an equal to all woes."

"Existence may be borne, and the deep root
Of life and sufferance make its firm abode
In bare and desolated bosoms: mute
The camel labors with the heaviest load,
And the wolf dies in silence."

Prometheus, whose "impenetrable spirit earth and heaven could not convulse," is the ideal of this patient endurance of

torture; for Byron was not ever the champion of noisy miseries and talkative despair, but could feel the power of

"Silent suffering, and intense;

The rock, the vulture, and the chain,
All that the proud can feel of pain,
The agony they do not show,
The suffocating sense of woe,

Which speaks but in its loneliness,

And then is jealous, lest the sky
Should have a listener, nor will sigh
Until its voice is echoless."

Hope and joy, to this stern misanthropy, are bubbles that break in every breath of experience. No one can escape the inevitable doom. The only relief is to be sought in a sullen endurance of misery, which takes a grim delight in the consciousness of the capacity to suffer; or in a strength of will, which would scale the "cherubim-defended battlements" of heaven, and quail not before the "fire-armed angels," in its rhapsodies of meditation. Those who, when once deceived by hope, weave again the same web of delusion, only fall deeper into the pit of wretchedness or mean

ness:

"Some, bowed and bent,
Wax gray and ghastly, withering ere their time,
And perish with the reed on which they leant;
Some seek devotion, toil, war, good, or crime,
According as their souls were formed to sink or climb."

Life, at the best, is an evil. Pain and suffering track the happiest. Only in the stern defiance or endurance of evil can the soul find any stability.

"Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen,

Count o'er thy days from anguish free,
And know, whatever thou hast been,
'T is something better not to be."

It is almost needless to say, that Byron never reached the point of indifference to misery and hatred of the world, which he loved to contemplate. This was his ideal of greatness, and he never realized it. It had a charm for his swift passions and his daring fancy; but he was too weak and veering to practise it consistently in life. He was no hero, either in the service of Satan or the service of heaven. But he had a large inward experience of that condition of the heart, from which the devilish in conduct flows; and he has represented it with marvellous force and skill. In "Man

fred," especially, he has arrayed the Satanic aspect of life in a gloomy majesty, which makes it act powerfully on the imagination. A kind of shuddering sympathy is awakened for the hero. The stormy emotions which convulse his being; the demoniacal pride with which his agonies are borne; the intensity and might of passion, which breathe and burn in almost every word he utters; the picturesque sublimity of the scenes in which the action of the piece passes; the occasional touches of quiet beauty and holy sentiment, which shoot across the ravings of remorse, or twinkle in the sombre imagery of despair; and the continuity of the feeling which overspreads and pervades the whole drama; - all these give to the work a singular fascination, from which it is difficult to escape. Manfred represents a man of superhuman pride and superhuman ambition, — bound by no moral laws, which yet have the power to scourge him, -hating the world and his kind, and seemingly fated to be a curse to himself, and to all who meet him either in love or hate. In his confession to the Witch of the Alps, we have a most distinct statement of that disgust for manki d, that yearning after superhuman knowledge, that wild search in the loneliest and most tempestuous aspects of nature for sympathy with inward emotions, with which the writings of Byron teem. He says,

"From my youth upward,

My spirit walked not with the souls of men,
Nor looked upon the earth with human eyes;
The thirst of their ambition was not mine;
The aim of their existence was not mine;
My joys, my griefs, my passions, and my powers,
Made me a stranger; though I wore the form,
I had no sympathy with breathing flesh."

In another connection, he represents himself as having had in his youth noble aspirations to sway the minds of men, and to be the enlightener of nations; but his thoughts "mistook themselves":

"I could not tame my nature down; for he

Must serve who fain would sway, and sooth- and sue—
And watch all time and pry into all place

And be a living lie

who would become

A mighty thing among the mean; and such
The mass are. I disdained to mingle with

A herd, though to be leader and of wolves.
The lion is alone, and so am I."

The crime which lends such mysterious horror to the re

morse and despair of Manfred is one which the pen hesitates to write. It is but obscurely hinted in his wild utterBut its remembrance is to him continual torment :

ances.

"Look on me in my sleep,

Or watch my watchings. Come and sit by me!

My solitude is solitude no more,

But peopled with the Furies I have gnashed
My teeth in darkness till returning morn,

Then cursed myself till sunset; - I have prayed
For madness as a blessing — 't is denied me.'

In the description of her whom he loved, and whom he destroyed, whose heart withered when it gazed on his, — a passion terrible in its consequences both to him and to her, some traits of his own character and the Satanic character are thrown in by contrast :

"She was like me in lineaments - her eyes
Her hair, her features, all, to the very tone
Even of her voice, they said were like to mine;
But softened all, and tempered into beauty:
She had the same lone thoughts and wanderings,
The quest of hidden knowledge, and a mind
To comprehend the universe; nor these
Alone, but with them gentler powers than mine,
Pity, and smiles, and tears- which I had not;
And tenderness - but that I had for her;

Humility and that I never had.

Her faults were mine - her virtues were her own."

We cannot refrain from making one more extract from this drama, in illustration of the inspiration of evil from which it takes its character, and the theory of sorrow and misery, as well as grandeur, which it inculcates.

There is something noble in the roll of these lines, which dignifies the pride and bitterness of soul from which they proceed.

The tremendous depth and intensity of passion, which Byron was capable of representing with such marvellous

skill of expression, is powerfully displayed in his misanthropical creations, and lends to them much of the sorcery they exercise on the feelings. When once we are fairly borne along the foaming and glittering tide of his impulsive genius, it becomes hard to muster any moral scruples as to the direction of the flood. Few poets excel him in the instantaneous sympathy he creates, even among minds having no natural affinity with his own. He is eminently the poet of passion. In almost all the changes of his mood, the same energy of feeling glows in his verse. The thought or emotion uppermost in his mind at any one time, whether it be bad or good, seems to sway, for the moment, all the faculties of his nature. He has a passionate love for evil, a passionate love for nature, for goodness, for beauty, and, we may add, a passionate love for himself. When he sits in the place of the scoffer, his words betray the same inspiration from impulse, the same passion, though condensed into bitterness and mockery. If we carefully observe the thoughtful and tender portions of his writings, we shall often find that the tenderness is but

"Moonlight on a troubled sea, Brightening the storm it cannot calm."

Restlessness is the characteristic of his nature. He himself speaks of his verse as bearing him onward as the wind bears the cloud; and his hatred of restraint and "proud precipitance of soul" are well expressed in his exulting gladness at being again on the boisterous element he loved:

"Once more upon the waters! - yet, once more !
And the waves bound beneath me as a steed
That knows its rider. Welcome to their roar !

Swift be their guidance, wheresoe'er it lead !

Though the strained mast should quiver as a reed,

And the strained canvass fluttering strew the gale,

Yet must I on; for I am as a weed

Hung from the rock, on ocean's foam, to sail

Where'er the surge may sweep, the tempest's breath prevail."

The force of passion with which he could express his sense of individual wrong, and his power of carrying the heart with him in his sorrowful consecrations of his own miseries, are displayed with a wild and smiting energy of utterance in the following stanzas: