the crimes and vagaries of human passions, and this without any meaning or moral which might render the sacrifice excusable, we have been ready to apostrophize him in the inimitably beautiful lines of another well-known bard: Oh how canst thou renounce the boundless store Of charms which nature to her votaries yields; The warbling woodland, the résounding shore, The pomp of groves, the garniture of fields, And all the genial ray of morning gilds, And all that echoes to the breath of even, tions; but will fairly acknowledge, that the defect, if it be one, has been voluntary. The truth is, that several of Lord Byron's later works, while they were perhaps still more exceptionable in a moral point of view than those which had preceded them, were so far below the acknowledged powers of his lordship's poetical genius that the simple unmixed disapprobation, which every reader of taste or correct sentiment must have felt on these occasions, was the only comment such hasty productions either needed or deserved. One tale, in particular, exhibited such grossness of thought and feeling, unrelieved by poetical ornament or intellectual beauty, that we almost suspected the noble lord was trying an experiment, in order to ascertain how far the good-nature Oh how canst thou renounce, and hope of the British Public would yield to the mere fascination of his lordship's name. The intrusion of domestic feuds was, if possible, a still more disgusting exhibition; for, if a British nobleman must amuse himself with family altercations, in order to relieve his ennui, he should at least take the advice which Bonaparte once gave to the French Directory, to compose domestic differences at home, without submitting them to the rude gaze of vulgar curiosity. It is really with unaffected pain that we have viewed this young nobleman lavishing his distinguished talents upon such unworthy, and worse than unworthy, subjects as have almost exclusively engrossed them. Even if he could not be persuaded to cultivate a feeling for the higher departments of moral beauty, he might at least have found objects in nature and innocent art sufficient to employ and develop all the powers of his mind, without having recourse to corsairs, and renegadoes, and the various tribes of ruffians with which he has peopled his imagination. Oftentimes when we have seen him quitting the beauties of nature for And all the monntain's sheltering bo som shields, And all the dread magnificence of heaven, to be forgiven !* But though we have left unnoticed several of Lord Byron's later poems, the third canto of Childe Harold has a sort of claim upon our attention. In the first place, the hero of the poem is an old acquaintance, whose youthful crimes and follies we have before had occasion to noticet, and whose maturer pilgrimage we therefore could not, in common civility, pass over in silence. The poem has, besides, the great negative merit of being free from the aforesaid ruffian tribes; and, as far as we can discover, there is neither murder nor incest from beginning to end. In addition to these claims on our attention, we think the present production superior to several of its predecessors, in literary merit; and as we fear that Lord Byron's poetical fame, unless he shall follow the friendly counsel which we have more than once addressed to him, may soon sink may soon sink as undeservedly low, as it once rose undeservedly high, we are glad to avail ourselves of any symptom of im Beattie's Minstrel. + See Vol. for 1812, p. 376. provement, however equivocal, in order to procrastinate the dreaded event. Our bard, however, well knows that no man can write an author down but himself; and in this respect Lord Byron has far more to dread from his own wayward pen, than from that of any of his critics. No man who lets off a poem every six months, can reasonably hope long to attract attention to his performances; nor will all the " guns, trumpets, blunderbusses, drums, and thunder," with which his lordship lately announced one of his poems, be sufficient to arouse the public, when once they have fairly fallen asleep. To those who can pardon a little of that egotism for which the Childe is conspicuous, the open ing of the present work, though certainly not very musical in its cadences, will appear tender and interesting. "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. The waters heave around me; and on high Flung from the rock, on ocean's foam, to sail Where'er the surge may sweep, the tenpest's breath prevail." pp. 3, 4. The noble bard takes the opportunity, during this vagrant voyage, of relating, in about a dozen querulous stanzas, a part of the Childe's history, since his return from his former pilgrimage. We regret that his lordship should have made his poem personal, or have identified himself, as he evidently has done, with the hero of his tale, the "self-exiled Harold," a cold-hearted, sated, sensualist, whose errors are as much those of the understanding as the affections. If, however, Lord Byron chooses to be known as Childe Harold, we very sincerely hope and pray that at least he may have occasion to publish one canto more, with the title of "The Wandering Childe reclaimed." In the stanzas to which we have alluded, the poet informs us, that having, during his "youth's summer," sung of one, "the wandering outlaw of his own dark mind," he again "seizes the theme," and clings to it, "though a dreary strain," in order to soothe his mind Awaking with a start, and divert his melancholy. He seems effectually to have acquired Horace's nil admirari, "so that no wonder waits him," and neither "love, nor sorrow, fame, ambition, strife," can move his soul. He, however, seeks the aid of poesy, as thousands have done before, in order 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. With regard to the former part of this stanza, we leave the noble bard to the convictions of his own conscience; but in reply to the despairing exclamation of its being "too late," we can assure him it is never too late to have recourse to the mercies of a crucified Saviour, and the aids of his sanctifying Spirit. There, and there alone, the weary and heavy laden can find rest to their souls. These things duly premised, "Long absentHarold re-appears at last," but much altered, as might naturally be expected, "in soul and aspect, as in age." He had, it seems, in the interim, quaffed "life's enchanted cup" too quickly, and found "the dregs were wormwood;" any man who, in addition to the advantages of health, and birth, and fortune, possesses the two blessings implied in the very first line of this poem, has only to blame his own headstrong will and wayward passions, if he still remain morbidly discontented and unhappy. Indeed, our author frankly confesses, that the fault was in the Childe himself. "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 uncompell'd, 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. "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 tome Of his land's tongue, which he would oft forsake For nature's pages glass'd by sunbeams on the lake. To which it mounts, as if to break the link That keeps us from yon heaven which woos us to its brink. "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 eagerly 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." pp. 9, 10. To these verses, with the exception perhaps of the first, we are not disposed to deny the praise of good poetry; but amidst our admiration we again confess, that the personal feelings which characterise these effusions, have given us far more pain than pleasure. A poet always treads on dangerous ground, when self is his subject, and unless some interesting associations are connected with his melancholy, he ought never to obtrude it upon his readers. Voltaire, it is true, exhibited at once an incorrect judgment and a cold heart, when he presumed to blame Milton's introduction of his loss of sight into his immortal poem; but Voltaire would have been quite correct, in applying a similar censure to the personal allusions in the third canto of Childe Harold. These allusions are either intended to be understood, or they are not;-if unintelligible, they can waken little or no emotion; if understood, the emotions awakened are, we fear, by no means of a pleasing kind, or such as the right honourable bard would desire his readers to indulge. How different, for example, the associations connected with the display of personal feelings, in some of the poems of Henry Kirke White, to those connected with the name of our present author! An example will best illustrate our meaning. "Tis midnight! on the globe dread slumber sits, And all is silence in this hour of sleep; Save where the hollow gust that swells by fits In the dark wood roars fearfully and deep. -I wake alone to listen and to weep; To watch, my taper, thy pale beacon burn; And as still memory does her vigils keep Tells thou dost light me to the silent tomb. last ray Will fade in loneliness unwept away. In these lines every thing breathes tenderness and simplicity; the distress is not connected with any circumstance to deduct from the interest which the reader feels inclined to cherish. In some respects, the sentiment displayed in these and other pages of Kirke White is fully as morbid as that of Childe Harold himself; and the poetry, though good, by no means rises to the level of that which Lord Byron is able to achieve; yet every person of unsophisticated feeling can perceive that he uureservedly sympathizes with the one, while, in perusing the querulous strains of the other, there is a constant alternation between sympathy and disgust. The simple solution is, (and our noble author ought constantly to remember it,) that a poet, as well as an orator, must be indebted, as much to moral as intellectual qualities, if he would render his personal sensibilities. really interesting to an honest and well-regulated mind. Voyage is A thousand hearts beat happily; and when Music arose with its voluptuons swell, Soft eyes look'd love to eyes which spake again, like a rising knell! "Did ye not hear it?-No; 'twas but the wind, Or the car rattling o'er the stony street; On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; No sleep till morn, when youth and pleasure meet To chase the glowing hours with flying feet But, hark! that heavy sound breaks in once more, As if the clouds its echo would repeat; And nearer, clearer, deadlier than before! Arm! arm! it is-it is-the cannon's opening roar !" pp. 13, 14. And all went merry as a marriage-bell; The first spot on which the But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes Childe alights after his the field of Waterloo; and here we think Lord Byron has described best what no poet has yet described well, or at least in strains equal to the magnitude and interest of the subject. Indeed the enthusiasm of poetry, and the enthusiasm of real life are so different, that the battle of Waterloo can never furnish a good subject for a poem, till it loses something of its present vividness as a fact. No man ever read even Homer's Iliad, with half the ardour with which all classes of persons perused the common newspaper details of this memorable battle; so that were Homer himself to write a poem on the subject, it would appear flat and insipid to those who remembered the plain matter of fact; except perhaps, in proportion as such a poem might awaken dormant recollections, and thus add "the pleasures of memory" to the pleasures of poetical description. We cannot afford room for the whole of Lord Byron's delineation; and shall, therefore, content ourselves with two of the opening stanzas, in which the rapid transition from the "revelry" of the ball room, in which the officers passed the night, to the horrors of the next day's carnage, is well imagined, and ought to convey a far more than poetical moral on the uncertainty of human life, and the vanity of worldly pleasures. We omit his lordship's subsequent description, and also his expostulations with Bonaparte, whom he thinks fit, with exemplary courtesy, to entitle "the greatest nor the worst of men," and shall proceed to meet him on the banks of the river Rhine, where he beholds with admiration " a work divine, A blending of all beauties; streams and dells, Fruits, foliage, crag, wood, corn-field, mountain, vine, And chiefless castles breathing stern farewells From gray but leafy walls, where ruin greenly dwells." p. 26. The remarks on departed grandeur, and other reflections sug gested to the poet by the surroundng scenery, though not very novel, are almost necessarily interesting, from the nature of the feelings which they inspire. There is no subject on which a genuine poet is more sure of exciting a pleasing sympathy in his readers than in thus contrasting a peaceful landscape with the deeds and persons which once animated and adorned its beauties. The tranquil perma, nency of inanimate nature con. |