addressed to his half-sister, Lady Augusta Lee. It was written on the banks of the Rhine, May, 1816.

Drachenfels, "The Dragon's Rock" is the highest summit of the seven mountains which rise above the Rhine. There is a legend that Siegfried's dragon lived in one of the caves. The wine of \the country is therefore called dragon's blood.

Stanza LVI. Honor to Marceau: Marceau was a young French general, killed on the last day of the fourth year of the French Republic. His enemies as well as his friends admired his gallantry and wept over him, and his funeral was attended by officers from both armies.

Stanza LVIII. Ehrenbreitstein (the broad stone of honor), opposite Coblentz, was one of the strongest fortresses in Europe. It was blown up by the French after a long siege in 1799.

Stanza LXIII. Morat! the proud, the patriot field: a spot east of the lake of Neuchatel, where Charles the Bold was defeated by the Swiss, June, 1476. More than 20,000 Burgundians are said to have been killed in this battle.

Stanza LXIV. Cannae: Scene of the great battle in 216 B. C., when Hannibal defeated the Roman army. Marathon: Scene of the great battle between Greeks and Persians, B. C. 490. Draconic: / Draco was author of the first code of written laws at Athens. They were extremely severe.

Stanza LXV. A lonelier column: A solitary Corinthian column, left from the temple of Apollo, stands near the town of Aventicum (modern Avenches), which was the Roman capital of Helvetium.

Stanza LXVI. Julia was a young Aventian priestess who died after a vain endeavor to save her father. Unluckily, the epitaph which so moved Byron was really a forgery of a sixteenth century scholar.

Stanza LXVII. "This is written in the eye of Mont Blanc (June 3d, 1816), which even at this distance dazzles mine. (July 20th) I this day observed for some time the distant reflection of Mont Blanc and Mont Argentière in the calm of the lake, which I was crossing in my boat; the distance of these mountains from their mirror is sixty miles."-Byron.

Stanza LXXI. The arrowy Rhone: "The color of the Rhone at Geneva is blue, to a depth of tint which I have never seen equalled in water, salt or fresh, except in the Mediterranean and Archipelago."-Byron.

Cf. a wonderful description of the "blue rushing" in Ruskin's Praeterita.

"The Rhone flows like one lambent jewel; its surface is nowhere, its ethereal self is everywhere, the iridescent rush and translucent strength of it blue to the shore, and radiant to the depth. Fifteen feet thick, of not flowing but flying water, not water, neither, melted glacier rather one should call it, the force of

the ice is with it and the wreathing of the clouds, the gladness of the sky and the continuance of Time."

Stanzas LXXVI-LXXXIV. These stanzas contain Byron's character-study of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the famous Swiss writer of the eighteenth century. Rousseau's writings aroused enthusiasm for a return to more natural modes of thought and feeling. His theories of social equality played an important part in creating the Republics of the United States and of France. See Rousseau, by John Morley. The scene of Rousseau's novel, La Nouvelle Héloise, is the shores of the Lake of Geneva. Byron and Shelley read the book and visited the sites it mentions, together.

Byron was evidently chiefly impressed by the element of passion in the writings of Rousseau. In the eighty-first and eighty-second stanzas, however, he does justice to the power of Rousseau's intellectual conceptions.

Stanza LXXXII. A concise statement of Byron's estimate of the French Revolution. Compare that of Shelley, as given in the preface to The Revolt of Islam.

Stanzas LXXXIII-LXXXIV. Byron wrote in 1822: "The kingtimes are finishing. There will be blood shed like water and tears like mist: but the Peoples will conquer in the end. I shall not live to see it, but I foresee it."

Stanzas LXXXVII-XCVI. This passage is one of the most famous of Byron's descriptions of Nature. Stanzas LXXXVIIIXCII are intended to be full of solemn calm, and are dramatically contrasted with the following stanzas, which seek to render the sublimity of the storm. Byron wrote this passage among glorious scenery. He was also at this time strongly under the influence of Wordsworth and Shelley, and had moreover been re-reading with enthusiasm the work of Rousseau, who had helped to create in Europe a new sympathy with Nature.

Stanza LXXXIX. The sentiment of the latter part of this stanza is tinged with the pantheism common to the nature-poetry of this period.

Stanza XC. Cytherea's zone was the magic girdle of Venus, which endowed any one who wore it with irresistible charm.

Stanza XCI. "It is to be recollected that the most beautiful and impressive doctrines of the Divine Founder of Christianity were delivered not in the TEMPLE but on the MOUNT.

It is one thing to read the Iliad at Sigaeum and on the tumuli, or by the springs with Mount Ida above, and the plain and rivers and Archipelago around you, and quite another to trim your taper over it in a snug library-this I KNOW. Were the early and rapid progress of what is called Methodism to be attributed to any cause beyond the enthusiasm excited by its vehement faith and doctrines, I should venture to ascribe it to the practice of preaching in the fields."-Byron.

Stanza XCII. "The thunder storm to which these lines refer occurred on the thirteenth of June, 1816, at midnight. I have seen among the Acroceraunian mountains of Chimari several more terrible but none more beautiful."-Byron.

Stanza XCIII. Note the strong sense of revelling in the tumult of Nature. Such enthusiasm was as natural to Byron as a quiet joy in Nature's calmer aspects was to Wordsworth.

Stanza XCIV. The critics agree that Byron borrowed this fine metaphor from the second part of Coleridge's Christabel, where Coleridge describes the alienation of two friends:

But never either found another

To free the hollow heart from paining-
They stood aloof, the scars remaining
Like cliffs which had been rent asunder;

A dreary sea now flows between,

But neither heat nor frost nor thunder
Shall wholly do away, I ween,

The marks of that which once hath been.

Stanza XCIX. "In July, 1816, I made a voyage round the Lake of Geneva; and as far as my own observations have led me in a not uninterested nor inattentive survey of all the scenes most celebrated by Rousseau in his 'Heloise,' I can safely say, that in this there is no exaggeration. It would be difficult to see Clarens (with the scenes around it, Vevay, Chillon, Bôveret, St. Gingo, Meillerie, Eivan, and the entrances of the Rhone) without being forcibly struck with its peculiar adaptation to the persons and events with which it has been peopled. But this is not all: the feeling with which all around Clarens, and the opposite rocks of Meillerie, is invested, is of a still higher and more comprehensive order than the mere sympathy with individual passion; it is a sense of the existence of love in its most extended and sublime capacity, and of our own participation of its good and of its glory it is the great principle of the universe, which is there more condensed, but not less manifested; and of which, though knowing ourselves a part, we lose our individuality, and mingle in the beauty of the whole. If Rousseau had never written, nor lived, the same associations would not less have belonged to such scenes. He has added to the interest of his works by their adoption; he has shown his sense of their beauty by the selection; but they have done that for him which no human being could do for them.”—Byron.

Stanzas CV-CVII. In these stanzas, Byron gives a character sketch of two famous men of the preceding age: Voltaire, the French critic and skeptic, who lived for many years at Ferney, near Geneva; and Gibbon, the English historian, who in 1788 finished his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire at Lausanne on the site of the hotel now called by his name.

Byron wrote one hundred and thirty stanzas of this canto at white heat in thirty-three days after his return to Venice from a six-weeks' trip to Ferrara, Florence, and Rome, in the spring of 1817.

If the reader would share the emotion of the opening stanza he should know something of the history and art of Venice. Good books to consult are Horatio Brown's Venice: an Historical Sketch, and T. Okey's The Story of Venice. Ruskin's great book, The Stones of Venice, though not to be trusted as formal history, is full of splendid passages. Merely to turn its pages is to realize how slightly Byron touched on the treasures of the city.

Venice was founded by country-folk who fled from the invasion of the Huns under Attila in the fifth century, taking refuge on the little islands in the lagoon. Her power rose to its height in the fifteenth century, when she was the mistress of wide possessions to the east of her, in Dalmatia, the Grecian isles, and the Levant. Her magnificent art coincided with the height of her power and with the early stages of her decline. She remained a free Republic till 1797, when Napoleon put an end to her liberties and abolished the office of Doge. From that date to 1805 she was under the power of Austria. From 1805 till 1814 she belonged to Napoleon's Kingdom of Italy. She then passed again under Austrian dominion, and was, when Byron wrote, still subjected to this unendurable ignominy, which continued until the union and independence of Italy were consummated in 1866. These brief statements will explain many allusions in the text.

Stanza I. The Bridge of Sighs spans with a single covered arch the narrow canal between the Palace of the Doges, well described by Ruskin, and the old city dungeon.

The winged Lion's marble piles: St. Mark's Lion, the emblem of Venice, still looks proudly out from a column in the Piazza in front of St. Mark's Church, with St. Theodore and his crocodile as a pendant.

Stanza II. A sea Cybele: Byron borrowed this figure from Sabellicus, an Italian writer of the Renaissance. Cybele, the mother of the gods, was represented as crowned with towers. Her name is usually accented on the first syllable, but there is some authority for Byron's use, which he probably caught from the Italian pronunciation, which accents the penult.

Stanza III. Tasso's echoes: "The well-known song of the Gondoliers, of alternate stanzas from Tasso's Jerusalem, has died with the independence of Venice." So Byron's fellow-traveler, Hobhouse, annotates this line.

Crumbling to the shore: One of these palaces has now been carried away piecemeal from the Grand Canal, and forms part of Mrs. Jack Gardner's Museum at Fenway Court, Boston. See also note on line 114.

The masque of Italy: Masque here means carnival, festivity. Stanza IV. The Rialto, etc.: The Rialto is the famous bridge across the Grand Canal. Shylock and the Moor need no explanation. But alas for Byron's proud faith in literary immortality! How many people can identify Pierre without a note? He is a character in Otway's Venice Preserved. That Byron makes his name a monosyllable is an evidence of the provincialism of educated Englishmen in his day.

Stanza VI. This worn feeling: The phrase is loosely used. The antecedent is that sentiment which is the theme of the last stanza. Our fairy-land of the imagination is contrasted, first, with historic memories, then with personal experience.

Stanza VII. Are now but so: Parse "but so," if possible. Stanza VIII. The inviolate island of the sage and free: Byron's hurt resentment against England breathes through these stanzas; yet his unwilling tribute to her in this line ranks with the best expressions of patriotism in her literature.

Stanza IX. In a soil which is not mine: The poet's tempestuous spirit knew many moods. On another occasion he wrote to a friend: "I am sure my bones would not rest in an English grave, or my clay mix with the earth of that country. I believe the thought would drive me mad on my death-bed-I would not even feed your worms if I could help it."

Stanza X. The temple where the dead are honor'd: Not "dull oblivion" but the protest of the authorities debarred Byron from burial in Westminster Abbey.

The Spartan's epitaph: The answer made by the mother of Brasidas, the Spartan general, to those who praised her son. This stanza has the manly ring which atones for much of Byron's cgotism and lack of self-discipline..

Stanza XI. The spouseless Adriatic: Stanzas V to IX have formed an interlude. The poet now returns to Venice. This stana is full of allusions. The Bucentaur was the barge in which the Doge annually sailed out into the Lagoon, that he might throw a