amidst the gloomy prospects of a From a Tartar's skull they had stripped the threatening eternity, with no other flesh, support but innate energy and hard.

As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh;

And their white tusks crunched o'er the ened pride. These men have leşired whiter skull, too much, too impetuously, with a As it slipp'd through their jaws, when their senseless swing, like a horse which

edge grew dull.

As they lazily mumbled the bones of the does not feel the bit, and thenceforth

dead, their inner doom drives them to the When they scarce could rise from the spot abyss which they see, and cannot es. where they fed ; cape from. What a night was that of

So well had they broken a lingering fast

With those who had fallen for that night's ro Alp before Corinth! He is a rene

past. gade, and comes with the Mussulmans And Alp knew, by the turbans that roll'd on to besiege the Christians, his old

the sand,

The foremost of these were the best of his friends-Minotti, the father of the girl

band: he loves Next day he is to lead the Crimson and green were the shawls of their assault, and he thinks of his death, wear, which he forebodes, the carnage of his

And each scalp had a single long tuft of hair,

All the rest was shaven and bare. own soldiers, which he is preparing.

The scalps were in the wild dog's maw, There is no inner support, but rooted The hair was tangled round his jaw. resentment and a firm and stern will. But close by the shore on the edge of the The Mussulmans despise him, the

gulf,

There sat a vulture Alapping a wolf, Christians execrate him, and his glory

Who had stolen from the hills, but kept only publishes his treason. Dejected away, and fevered, he passes through the

Scared by the dogs, from the human prey ;

But he seized on his share of a steed that sleeping camp, and wanders on the

lay, shore:

Pick?d by the birds, on the sands of the "'Tis midnight : on the mountains brown The cold, round moon shines deeply down ; Such is the goal of man ; the hot frenzy Blue roll the waters, blue the sky Spreads like an ocean hung on high,

of life ends here; buried or not, it Bespangled with those isles of light. ...

matters little : vultures or jackals, one The waves on either shore lay there gravedigger is as good as another. Calm, clear, and azure as the air ;

The storm of his rages and his efforts And scarce their foam the pebbles shook, But murmur'd meekly as the brook.

have but served to cast him to these The winds were pillow'd on the waves ; animals for their food, and to their The banners droop'd along their staves. ...

:. beaks and jaws he comes only with the And that deep silence was unbroke, Save where the watch his signal spoke,

sentiment of frustrated hopes and inSave where the steed neighed oft and satiable desires. Could any of us forget shrill,

the death of Lara after once reading And the wide hum of that wild host

it? Has any one elsewhere seen, save Rustled like leaves from coast to coast."

in Shakspeare, a sadder picture of the How the heart sickens before such destiny of a man vainly rearing against spectacles! What a contrast between inevitable fate? Though generous, like his agony and the peace of immortal Macbeth, he has, like Macbeth, dared nature! 'How man stretches then his every thing against law and conscience, arms towards ideal beauty, and how even against pity and the most ordinary imr ytently thay fall back at the con- feelings of honor. Crimes committed tact of our clay and mortality! Alp have forced him into other crimes, and advances over the sandy shore to the blood poured out has made him glide foot of the bastion, exposed to the fire into a pool of blood. As a corsair, ho of the sentinels; and he hardly thinks has slain ; as a cut-throat, he assassi. of it:

nates; and his former murders which

haunt his dreams come with their bat's" And he saw the lean dogs beneath the wall Hold o'er the dead their carnival,

wings beating against the portals of Gorging and growling o'er carcase and limb ; his brain. He does not drive them

; They were too busy to bark at him! away, these black visitors; though the

.

and strange smile bear witness to their under an inclement sky, on the shores approach. And yet it is a noble spec- of a storny ocean,--the work of a too tacle to see man standing with calm wilful, too strong, too sombre race, countenance even under their touch. and which, after lavishing its images The last day comes, and six inches of of desolation and heroism, ends by iron suffice for all this energy and fury: stretching like a black veil over the Lara is lying beneath a lime tree, and whole of living nature the dream of his a jund " is bleeding fast from life universal destruction ; this dream is away." With each convulsion the here, as in the Edda, almost equally strear gushes blacker, then stops; the grand : blood lows now only drop by drop, and his

brow is already moist, his eyes “ I had a dream, which was not all a iream. dim. The victors arrive-he does not The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the

stars deign to answer them; the priest brings

Did wander darkling in the eternal space, near the absolving cross, “ but he Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth look'd upon it with an eye profane." Swung blind and blackening in the moonlesa What remains to him of life is for his air ;

Morn came and went and came, and brought poor pagę, the only being who loved

no day. him, who has followed him to the end, Forests were set on fire--but hour by hour and who now tries to stanch the blood They fell apd faded-and the crackling from his wound:

trunks

Extinguish'd with a crash-and all was " He scarce can speak, but motions him 'tis black. vain,

And they did live by watckfires and the He clasps the od that pang which would thrones assuage,

The palaces of crowned kings--the huts, And sadly smiles his thanks to that dark The habitations of all things which dwell,

Were burnt for beacons ; cities were con page. His dying tones are in that other tongue,

sumed, To which some strange remembrance wildly

And men were gathered round their blazing clung.

homos And as Kaled's answering accents

To look cace more into each other's face. .. once, ceased,

The brows of men by the despairing light Rose Lara's hand, and pointed to the East : Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits Whether (as then the breaking sun from high

The flashes fell upon them; some lay down Roll'd back the clouds) the morrow caught

And hid their eyes and wept; and some did

rest Or that 'twas chance, or some remember'd Their chins upon their clenched hands, and scene,

smiled; That raised his arm to point where such had And others hurried to and fro, and fed been,

Their funeral piles with fuel, and look'd up Scarce Kaled seem'd to know, but turn'd With mad disquietude on the dull sky,

The pall of a past world ; and then again As if his heart abhorr'd that coming day, With curses cast them down upon the dust, And shrunk his glance before that morning

And gnash'd their teeth and howld: the wild light,

birds shriek'd, To look' on Lara's browwhere all grew And, terrified, did Autter on the growid, night. :

And' Aap their useless wings; the wildest But from his visage little could we guess,

brutes So unrepentant, dark, and passionless. . Came tame and tremulous ; and vipen But gasping heaved the breath that Lara crawl'd drew,

And twined themselves among the multitude, And dull the film along his dim eye grew;

Hissing, but stingless--they were slain for His limos stretch'd fluttering, and his head

food : droop'd o'er."

And War, which for a moment was no more,

Did glut himself again ;-a meal was bought All is over, and of this haughty spirit W.th blood, and each sate sullenly apart there remains but a poor piece of clay

Gerging himself in gloom: po love was left; After all, it is the desirable lot of such

his eye,

away,

two

hands

*

The birds and beasts and famish'd men at of it, ther, quite freely : the subject of

bay, Till hunger clung them, or the dropping Manfred is the dominant idea of the dead

age, expressed so as to display the cured their lank jaws ; himself sought out no contrast of two masters, and of two na. food,

tions.
But with a piteous and perpetual moan, What constitutes Goethe's glory is,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answer'd not with a caress-he died. that in the nineteenth century he did
The crowd was famish'd by degrees ; but produce an epic poem-I mean a poem

in which genuine gods act and speak.
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies : they met beside

This appeared impossible in the ninc
The dying embers of an altar-place

tecnth century, since the special work
Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things of our age is the refined consideration
For an unholy usage; they raked up,
And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton of the poetic characters by which other

of creative ideas, and the suppression
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath ages have never failed to represent
Blew for a little life, and made a flame them. Of the two divine families, the
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld

Greek and the Christian, neither seem. Each other's aspects-saw, and shriek'd, and ed capable of re-entering the epic died

world. Classic literature dragged down Even of their mutual hideousness they in its fall the mythological puppets, died.

and the ancient gods slept on their old IV.

Olympus, whither history and archæ

ology alone might go to arouse them Amongst these unrestrained and The angels and saints of the middle gloomy poems, which incessantly re- ages, as strange and almost as far from turn and dwell on the same subject, our thoughts, slept on the vellum of theia is one more imposing and lofty their missals and in the niches of their than the rest, Manfred, twin-brother of cathedrals; and if a poet like Chateauthe greatest poem of the age, Goethe's briand, tried to make them enter the Faust. Goethe says of Byron : “This modern world,* he succeeded only in singular intellectual poet has taken my degrading them, and in making of them Faustus to himself, and extracted from vestry decorations and operatic mait the strongest nourishment for his chinery. The mythic credulity disaphypochondriac humor. He has made peared amid the growth of experience, use of the impelling principles in his the mystic amid the growth of prosperown way, for his own purposes, so that ity. Paganism, at the contact of no one of them remains the same; and science, was reduced to the recognition ' it is particularly on this account that I of natural forces; Christianity at the cannot enough admire his genius.” contact of morality, was reduced to the The play is indeed original. Byron adoration of the ideal. In order again writes: "His (Goethe's) Faust I never to deify physical powers, man should read, for I don't know German; but have become once more a healthy Matthew Monk Lewis, in 1816, at Co-child, as in Homer's “ime. In order ligny, translated most of it to me viva again 6 deify spiritual powers, man voce, and I was naturally much struck shoul have become once more a sick. with it; but it was the Steinbach and the ly child, as in Dante's time. But he Jungfrau and something else, much was an adult, and could nct ascend nore than Faustus, that made me write again to civilizations or epics, from Manfred." + Goethe adds : “ The which the current of his

ought and whole is so completely formed anew, of his life had withdrawn him forever. that it would be an interesting task How was he to be show his gods, the for the critic to point out not only the modern gods ? how could he reclotha alterations he (Byron). has made, but them in a personal and visible form, their degree of resemblance or dissimi- since he had toiled to strip them prelarity to the original.” Let us spea's cisely of all personal and sensible form,

cure.”

and had succeeded in this. Instead of | And the creative essence which surrounds,

And lives in all, and worketh ever more, rejecting legend, Goethe took it up

Encompass. within love's gracious bounds again. He chose a mediæval story for

And all the world of things, which flit before his theme. Carefully, scrupulously, The gaze in seeming fitful and obscure, ne Tacked old manners and old be. De . in lasting thoughts embody and se liefs; an alchemist's laboratory, a sor. cerer's conjuring-book, coarse villagers Are these angels, for an instant at least students' or drunkards' gayety, a witch any thing else than the ideal intelligence es' meeting on the Brocken, a mass in which comes, through sympathy, id church; we might fancy we saw añ love all, and through ideas, to compre ngraving of Luther's time, conscien- hend alí ? What shall we say of this

vus and minute: nothing is omitted. Deity, at first biblical and individual, l’eavenly characters appear in conse who little by little is unshaped, van ciated attitudes after the text of Scrip; ishes and, sinking to the depths, be ture. lik : the old mysteries : the Lord hind the splendors of living nature and withi his angels, then with the devil, mystic reverie, is confused with the inwho comes to ask permission to tempt accessible absolute ? Thus is the Faust, as formerly he tempted Job; whole poem unfolded, action and charheaven, as St. Francis imagined it and acters, men and gods, antiquity and Van Eyck painted it, with anchorites, middle ages, aggregate and details, holy women and doctors some in a always on the confines of two worlds landscape with bluish rocks, others

-one visible and figurative, the other above in the sublime air, hovering in intelligible and formless; one compre. choirs about the Virgin in glory, one hending the moving externals of his. tier above another. Goethe affects

tory or of life, and all that hued and even to be so orthodox as to write un- perfumed bloom which nature lavishes der each her Latin name, and her due

on the surface of existence, the other niche in the Vulgate.* And this very containing the profound generative fidelity proclaims him a skeptic. We powers and invisible fixed laws by see that if he resuscitates the ancient which all these living beings come to world, it is as a historian, not as a be the light of day. At last we see ow liever. He is only a Christian through gods : we no longer parody them, like remembrance and poetic feeling. In our ancestors, by idols or persons; we him the modern spirit overflows de perceive them as they are in themsignedly the narrow vessel in which he selves, and we have no need, in order designedly seems to enclose it. The to see them, to renounce poetry, nor thinker percolates through the narra- break with the past. We remain on. tor. Every instant a calculated word, our knees before the shrines where which seems involuntary, opens up men have prayed for three thousand glimpses of philosophy, beyond the years; we do not tear a single rose Veils of tradition. Who are they, these from the chaplets with which they supernatural personages, - this god, have crowned their divine Madonnas; this Mephistopheles, these angels? We do not extinguish a single candle The'r substance incessantly dissolves which they have crowded on the altar and re-forms, to show or hide alternate- steps; we behold with an artist's pleasly the idea which tills it. Are they ure the precious shrines where, amidst abstractions or characters ? Mephis- the wrought candlesticks, the suns a ropheles, a revolutionary and a philoso diamonds, the gorgeous copes, they pher, who has read Candide, and cyni- have scattered the purest treasures of cally jeers at the Powers --is he any- their genius and their heart. But our thing but “the spirit of negation ? ” thoughts pierce further than our eyes. The angels

For us, at certain moments, these dra. Rejoice to share The wealth exuberant of all that's iair,

* Goethe's Faust, translated by Thcodore Which lives, and has its being everywhere !

Martin. Prologue in Heaven.

Goethe sings : * Magna peccatrix, S. Lucæ, vii. 36; Mulier “ Wer ruft das Einselne zur allgemeinen Samaritana, S. Johannis, iv. ; Maria Ægya

Weihe tiaca (Acta Sanctorum), etc.

Wo es in herrlichen Accorden schlugt *

!

Instan

1

peries, this marble, all this pomp va. or accent; his whole care is to keep it
cillates ; it is no longer aught but intact and pure. Thus is his work
beautiful phantoms; it vanishes in the produced, an echo of universal nature
smoke, and we discover through it and a vast chorus in which gods, men, past,
behind it the impalpable ideal which present, all periods of history, all con-
has set up these pillars, lighted these ditions of life, all orders of existence
roofs, and hovered for centuries over agree without confusion, and in which
the kneeling multitude.

the flexible genius of the mus.cian, who
To understand the legend and also is alternately transforlaed into each
to understand life, is the object of this one of them in order to interpret and
work, ar.d of the whole work of Goethe. comprenend them, only bears witness
Every thing, brutish or rational, vile or to his own thought in giving an insight,
sublime, fantastic or tangible, is a group beyond this immense harmony, into
of powers, of which our mind, through the group of ideal laws whence it is
study and sympathy, may reproduce in derived, and the inner reason which
itself the elements and the disposition. sustains it.
Let us reproduce it, and give it in our Beside this lofty conception, what is
thought a new existence. Is a gossip the supernatural part of Manfred ?
like Martha, babbling and foolisha Doubtless Byron is moved by the great
drunkard like Frosch, brawling and things of nature; he has just left the
dirty, and the other Dutch boors-un- Alps; he has seen those glaciers which
worthy to enter a picture ? Even the are like "a frozen hurricane,"—those
female apes, and the apes who sit be- “torrents which roll the sheeted silver's
side the cauldron, watching that it does waving column o'er the crag's head-
not boil over, with their hoarse cries long perpendicular, like the pale cour-
and disordered fancies, may repay the ser's tale, as told in the Apocalypse,"-
trouble of art in restoring them. but he has brought nothing from them
Wherever there is life, even bestial but images. His witch, his spirits, his
or maniacal, there is beauty. The Arimanes, are but stage gods. He be-
more we look upon nature, the more lieves in them no more than we do.
we find it divine-divine even in rocks Genuine gods are created with much
and plants. Consider these forests, greater difficulty ; we must believe in
they seem motionless ; but the leaves them; we must, like Goethe, have as-
breathe, and the sap mounts insensibly sisted long at their birth, like philoso-
through the massive trunks and branch- phers and scholars; we must have seen
es, to the slender shoots, stretched like of them more than their externals. He
fingers at the end of the twigs; it fills who, whilst continuing a poet, becomes
the swollen ducts, leaks out in living a naturalist and geologist, who has fol-
forms, loads the frail aments with lowed in the fissures of the rocks the
fecundating dust, spreads profusely tortuous waters slowly distilled, and
through the fermenting air the vapors driven at length by their own weight
and odors : this luminous air, this dome to the light, may ask himself, as the
of verdure, this long colonnade of trees, Greeks did formerly, when they saw
this silent soil, labor and are trans- them roll and sparkle in their emerald
formed; they accomplish a work, and tints, what these waters might be think.
the poet's heart has but to listen to ing, whether they thought. What a
them to find a voice for their obscure Istrar ge life is theirs, alternately at rest
instincts. They speak in his heart; j and in violent motion! How far re.
still better, they sing, and other beings moved from ours ! With what effort
di) the same ; each, by its distinct mel. must we tear ourselves from our worn
ody, short or long, strange or simple, and complicated passions, to compre-
soleiy adapted to its nature, capable of hend the youth and divine simplicity
manifesting it fully, in the same man- of a being without reflection and form!
ner as a sound, by its pitch, its height, How difficult is such a work for a mod-
its force, manifests the inner structure ern man! How impossible for an
of the body which has produced it. Englishman! Shelley, Keats approach.
This melody the poet respects; he ed it,--thanks to the nervous delicacy
avoids altering it by confusing its ideas of their sickly or overflowing imagina.

a