frequently alluded to in the publications before us, that they cannot pass without some notice, which we will study to render as brief as it is impartial.

The poet thus gifted, thus honoured, thus admired, no longer entitled to regard himself as one defrauded of his just fame, and expelled with derision from the lists in which he had stood forward a candidate for honour, but crowned with all which the public could bestow, was now in a situation apparently as enviable as could be attained through mere literary celebrity. The sequel may be given in the words in which the author, adopting here more distinctly the character of Childe Harold than in the original poem, has chosen to present it to us, and to assign the cause why Childe Harold has resumed his pilgrim's staff when it was hoped he had set down for life a denizen of his native country. The length of the quotation will be pardoned by those who can feel at once the moral interest and poetical beauty with which it abounds.

VIII.

'Something too much of this :-but now 'tis past,
And the spell closes with its silent seal.
Long absent HAROLD re-appears at last;

He of the breast which fain no more would feel,
Wrung with the wounds which kill not, but ne'er heal,
Yet Time, who changes all, had altered him
In soul and aspect as in age: years steal

Fire from the mind as vigour from the limb;
And life's enchanted cup but sparkles near the brim.

IX.

His had been quaff'd too quickly, and he found
The dregs were wormwood; but he fill'd again,
And from a purer fount, on holier ground,
And deem'd its spring perpetual; but in vain!
Still round him clung invisibly a chain

Which gall'd for ever, fettering though unseen,
And heavy though it clank'd not; worn with pain,
Which pined although it spoke not, and grew keen,
Entering with every step, he took, through many a scene.
X.

• Secure in guarded coldness, he had mix'd
Again in fancied safety with his kind,
And deem'd his spirit now so firmly fix'd
And sheath'd with an invulnerable mind,
That, if no joy, no sorrow lurk'd behind;
And he, as one, might midst the many stand
Unheeded, searching through the crowd to find
Fit speculation! such as in strange land

He found in wonder-works of God and nature's hand.

XI.

'But who can view the ripened rose, nor seek
To wear it? who can curiously behold
The smoothness and the sheen of beauty's cheek,
Nor feel the heart can never all grow old?
Who can contemplate Fame through clouds unfold
The star which rises o'er her steep, nor climb ?
Harold, once more within the vortex, roll'd
On with the giddy circle, chasing Time,
Yet with a nobler aim than in his youth's fond prime.
XII.

'But soon he knew himself the most unfit

Of men to herd with Man; with whom he held
Little in common; untaught to submit

His thoughts to others, though his soul was quell'd

In youth by his own thoughts; still uncompelled,
He would not yield dominion of his mind
To spirits against whom his own rebell'd ;
Proud though in desolation; which could find

A life within itself, to breathe without mankind.

XIII.

Where rose the mountains, there to him were friends;
Where roll'd the ocean, thereon was his home;
Where a blue sky, and glowing clime, extends,
He had the passion and the power to roam;
The desert, forest, cavern, breaker's foam,
Were unto him companionship; they spake
A mutual language, clearer than the tone

Of his land's tongue, which he would oft forsake
For Nature's pages glass'd by sunbeams on the lake.
XIV.

'Like the Chaldean, he could watch the stars,
Till he had peopled them with beings bright
As their own beams; and earth, and earth-born jars,
And human frailties, were forgotten quite :
Could he have kept his spirit to that flight
He had been happy; but this clay will sink
Its spark immortal, envying in the light
To which it mounts, as if to break the link
That keeps us from yon heaven which woos us to its brink.
XV.

"But in Man's dwellings he became a thing
Restless and worn, and stern and wearisome,
Droop'd as a wild-born falcon with clipt wing,
To whom the boundless air alone were home;
Then came his fit again, which to o'ercome,
As eargerly the barr'd-up bird will beat
His breast and beak against his wiry dome

Till the blood tinge his plumage, so the heat
Of his impeded soul would through his bosom eat.
XVI.

'Self-exiled Harold wanders forth again,
With nought of hope left, but with less of gloom;
The very knowledge that he lived in vain,
That all was over on this side the tomb,
Had made Despair a smilingness assume,

Which, though 'twere wild,-as on the plundered wreck
When mariners would madly meet their doom
With draughts intemperate on the sinking deck,-
Did yet inspire a cheer, which he forbore to check.'
Canto III. p. 7-11.

The commentary through which the meaning of this melancholy tale is rendered obvious, has been long before the public, and is still in vivid remembrance; for the errors of those who excel their fellows in gifts and accomplishments are not soon forgotten. Those scenes, ever most painful to the bosom, were rendered yet more so by public discussion; and it is at least possible that amongst those who exclaimed most loudly on this unhappy occasion, were some in whose eyes literary superiority exaggerated Lord Byron's offence. The scene may be described in a few words-the wise condemned-the good regretted the multitude, idly or maliciously inquisitive, rushed from place to place, gathering gossip, which they mangled and exaggerated while they repeated it; and impudence, ever ready to hitch itself into notoriety, hooked on, as Falstaff enjoins Bardolph, blustered, bullied, and talked of pleading a cause' and 'taking a side.'

The family misfortunes which have for a time lost Lord Byron to his native land have neither chilled his poetical fire, nor deprived England of its benefit. The Third Canto of Childe Harold. exhibits, in all its strength and in all its peculiarity, the wild, powerful, and original vein of poetry which, in the preceding cantos, first fixed the public attention upon the author. If there is any difference, the former seem to us to have been rather more sedulously corrected and revised for publication, and the present work to have been dashed from the author's pen with less regard to the subordinate points of expression and versification. Yet such is the deep and powerful strain of passion, such the original tone and colouring of description, that the want of polish in some of its minute parts rather adds to than deprives the poem of its energy. It seems, occasionally, as if the consideration of mere grace was beneath the care of the poet, in his ardour to hurry upon the reader the thoughts that glow and words that burn ;' and that the occasional roughness of the verse corresponded with the stern tone of thought, and of mental suffering which it expresses. We have

remarked the same effect produced by the action of Mrs. Siddons, when, to give emphasis to some passage of overwhelming passion, she has seemed wilfully to assume a position constrained, stiffened, violent, diametrically contrary to the rules of grace, in order, as it were, to concentrate herself for the utterance of grief, or passion which disdained embellishment. In the same manner, versification, in the hands of a master-bard, is as frequently correspondent to the thoughts it expresses as to the action it describes, and the line labours and the words move slow' under the heavy and painful thought; wrung, as it were, from the bosom, as when Ajax is heaving his massy rock. It is proper, however, to give some account of the plan of the poem before we pursue these observations. The subject is the same as in the preceding Cantos of the 'Pilgrimage.' Harold wanders over other fields and amid other scenery, and gives vent to the various thoughts and meditations which they excite in his breast. The poem opens with a beautiful and pathetic, though abrupt, invocation to the infant daughter of the author, and bespeaks at once our interest and our sympathy for the self-exiled Pilgrim.

I.

Is thy face like thy mother's, my fair child!
Ada! sole daughter of my house and heart?
When last I saw thy young blue eyes they smiled,
And then we parted,-not as now we part,

But with a hope.

Awaking with a start,

The waters heave around me; and on high
The winds lift up their voices; I depart,
Whither I know not; but the hour's gone by,

When Albion's lessening shores could grieve or glad mine eye.
II.

'Once more upon the waters! yet once more!
And the waves bound beneath me as a steed
That knows his rider. Welcome, to their roar!
Swift be their guidance, wheresoe'er it lead!
Though the strain'd mast should quiver as a reed,
And the rent canvass fluttering strew the gale,
Still must I on; for I am as a weed,

Flung from the rock, on Ocean's foam, to sail
Where'er the surge may sweep, the tempest's breath prevail.'
Canto III. pp. 3, 4.

The theme of Childe Harold is then resumed, and the stanzas fol low which we have already quoted, and which, it must be allowed, identify the noble author with the creature of his imagination more intimately than in the former Cantos. We do not mean to say that all Childe Harold's feelings and adventures must be considered

as those of Lord Byron, but merely that there is much of Lord Byron in the supposed Pilgrim.

On the plan itself we may briefly remark, that the localities of which it necessarily treats connect it with the real as well as the beautiful. An ingenious friend has well observed, that the plain, the rock, the hillock, which marks the scene of some distinguished event, has frequently an effect more powerful upon the mind than even the monuments of art designed expressly to preserve its memory. These localities have also the merit of imperishability, and carry back their associations to periods far more remote than art can refer to. Pictures fade and statues moulder and temples decay, and cities perish but the sod of Marathon is immortal-and he who has trode it has identified himself with Athenian story in a manner which neither painter, nor poet, nor sculptor could have accomplished for him. Shakspeare, whom nothing escaped, hints, in the celebrated passage already quoted, that it is one of the highest offices of poetry to connect our ideas with some local habitation.' In this respect, poetry has been falsely characterized as dealing in fiction. History may do so perhaps too often; but poetry, at least good poetry, is connected only with realities either of visible or of moral nature. It is therefore with no ordinary pleasure that we follow the Pilgrim through scenes to which his poetry gives new interest, while it recalls that attached to them by historical or moral associations.

He arrives on Waterloo,-a scene where all men, where a poet especially, and a poet such as Lord Byron, must needs pause, and amid the quiet simplicity of whose scenery is excited a moral interest deeper and more potent even than that which is produced by gazing upon the sublinest efforts of Nature in her most romantic

recesses.

That Lord Byron's sentiments do not correspond with ours is obvious, and we are sorry for both our sakes. For our own,-because we have lost that note of triumph with which his harp would otherwise have rung over a field of glory such as Britain never reaped before; and on Lord Byron's account,-because it is melancholy to see a man of genius duped by the mere cant of words and phrases, even when facts are most broadly confronted with them. If the poet has mixed with original, wild, and magnificent creations of his imagination, prejudices which he could only have caught by the contagion which he most professes to despise, it is he himself must be the loser. If his lofty muse has soared in all her brilliancy over the field of Waterloo without dropping even one leaf of laurel on the head of Wellington, his merit can dispense even with the praise of Lord Byron. And as, when the images of Brutus were excluded from the triumphal procession, his memory became only