The Life of Lord Byron.

BY J. W. LAKE.

O'er the harp, from earliest years beloved,
He threw his fingers hurriedly, and tones
Of melancholy beauty died away
Upon its strings of sweetness.

Ir was reserved for the present age to produce We think that many points of resemblance one distinguished example of the Muse having may be traced between Byron and Rousseau. descended upon a bard of a wounded spirit, and Both are distinguished by the most ardent and lent her lyre to tell afflictions of no ordinary de- vivid delineation of intense conception, and by scription-afflictions originating probably in that a deep sensibility of passion rather than of afsingular combination of feeling with imagination | fection. Both, too, by this double power, have which has been called the poetical temperament, held a dominion over the sympathy of their and which has so often saddened the days of those readers, far beyond the range of those ordinary on whom it has been conferred. If ever a man was feelings which are excited by the mere efforts of entitled to lay claim to that character in all its genius. The impression of this interest still strength and all its weakness, with its unbounded accompanies the perusal of their writings; but range of enjoyment, and its exquisite sensibility there is another interest, of more lasting and far of pleasure and of pain, that man was Lord Byron. stronger power, which each of them possessed,—— Nor does it require much time or a deep acquaint- the continual embodying of the individual chaance with human nature to discover why these racter, it might almost be said of the very person, extraordinary powers should in so many cases of the writer. When we speak or think of Roushave contributed more to the wretchedness than seau or Byron, we are not conscious of speaking to the happiness of their possessor. or thinking of an author: we have a vague but impassioned remembrance of men of surpassing genius, eloquence, and power,-of prodigious capacity both of misery and happiness: we feel as if we had transiently met such beings in real life, or had known them in the obscure communion of a dream. Each of their works presents, in succession, a fresh idea of themselves; and, while the productions of other great men stand out from them, like something they have created, theirs, on the contrary, are images, pictures, busts of their living selves,-clothed, no doubt, at dif

The imagination all compact, which the greatest poet who ever lived has assigned as the distinguishing badge of his brethren, is in every case a dangerous gift. It exaggerates, indeed, our expectations, and can often hid its possessor hope, where hope is lost to reason; but the delusive pleasure arising from these visions of imagination resembles that of a child whose gaze is attracted by a fragment of glass to which a sunbeam has given momentary splendour: he hastens to the spot with breathless impatience, and finds the object of his wonder and expec-ferent times in different drapery, and prominent tation equally vulgar and worthless. Such is the man of quick and exalted powers of imagination: his fancy over-estimates the object of his wishes; and pleasure, fame, distinction, are alternately pursued, attained, and despised when in

his power.
Like the enchanted fruit in the
palace of a sorcerer, the objects of his admiration
lose their attraction and value as soon as they are
grasped by the adventurer's hand; and all that
remains is regret for the time lost in the pursuit,
and wonder at the hallucination under the
influence of which it was undertaken. The dis-
proportion between hope and possession which is
felt by all men, is thus doubled to those whom
nature has endowed with the power of gilding a
distant prospect with the rays of imagination.

from a different back-ground,—but still impressed with the same form, and mien, and lineaments, and not to be mistaken for the representations of any other of the children of men.

But this view of the subject, though universally felt to be a true one, requires perhaps a little explanation. The personal character to which we allude, is not altogether that on which the seal of life has been set, and to which, therefore, moral approval or condemnation is necessarily annexed, as to the language or conduct of actual existence: it is the character, so to speak, which is prior to conduct, and yet open to good and to ill-the constitution of the being in body and in soul. Each of these illustrious writers has, in this light, filled his works with expressions of his own character,

a

-has unveiled to the world the secrets of his own being. They have gone down into those depths which every man may sound for himself, though not for another; and they have made disclosures to the world of what they beheld and knew there -disclosures that have excited a profound and universal sympathy, by proving that all mankind, the troubled and the untroubled, the lofty and the low, the strongest and the weakest, are linked together by the bonds of a common but inscrutable

nature.

public mind only pity, sorrow, or repugnance. But in the case of men of real genius, like Byron, it is otherwise: they are not felt, while we read, as declarations published to the world, but almost as secrets whispered to chosen ears. Who is there that feels for a moment, that the voice which reaches the inmost recesses of his heart is speaking to the careless multitudes around him? Or if we do so remember, the words seem to pass by others like air, and to find their way to the hearts for whom they were intended

Thus, each of these wayward and richly-gifted | kindred and sympathetic spirits, who discern spirits made himself the object of profound interest to the world, and that too during periods of society when ample food was every where spread abroad for the meditation and passions of

men.

Although of widely dissimilar fortunes and birth, a close resemblance in their passions and their genius may be traced too between Byron and Robert Burns. Their careers were short and glorious, and they both perished in the rich summer of their life and song,» and in all the splendour of a reputation more likely to increase than diminish. One was a peasant, and the other a peer; but nature is a great leveller, and makes amends for the injuries of fortune by the richness of her benefactions: the genius of Burns raised him to a level with the nobles of the land; by nature, if not by birth, he was the peer of Byron. They both distinguished themselves by the force of their genius, and fell by the strength of their passions; one wrote from a love, and the other from a scorn of mankind; and both sung of the emotions of their own hearts with a vehemence and an originality which few have equalled, and none have surpassed.

and own that secret language, of which the
privacy is not violated, though spoken in the
hearing of the uninitiated, because it is not un-
derstood. A great poet may address the whole
world in the language of intensest passion, con-
cerning objects of which, rather than speak face
to face with any one human being, he would
For it is in solitude that
perish in his misery.
he utters what is to be wafted by all the winds of
heaven: there are present with him during his
He is not
inspiration only the shadows of men.
daunted, or perplexed, or disturbed, or repelled
He can draw
by real, living, breathing features.
just as much of the curtain as he chuses that hangs
between his own solitude and the world of life.
He there pours his soul out partly to himself alone,
partly to the ideal abstractions and impersonated
images that float around him at his own conjura-
tion; and partly to human beings like himself,
He confesses
moving in the every-day world.
himself, not before men, but before the spirit of
humanity; and he thus fearlessly lays open his
heart, assured that nature never prompted to
genius what will not triumphantly force its way
into the human heart.

The versatility of authors who have been able It is admitted that Byron has depicted much of to draw and support characters as different from himself in all his heroes; but when we seem to each other as from their own, has given to their see the poet shadowed out in all those states of productions the inexpressible charm of variety, disordered being which his Childe Harolds, and has often secured them from that neglect Giaours, Conrads, Laras, and Alps exhibit, we which in general attends what is technically called merely conceive that his mind felt within itself mannerism. But it was reserved for Lord Byron the capacity of such disorders, not that it had (previous to his Don Juan) to present the same endured them, and exhibits itself before us only character on the public stage again and again, in possibility. This is not common, it is rare in varied only by the exertions of that powerful great poets: Homer, Shakspeare, and Milton genius which, searching the springs of passion and never so exhibit themselves in the characters they of feeling in their innermost recesses, knew how portray their poetical personages have no reto combine their operations, so that the interest | ference to themselves, but are distinct, indepenwas eternally varying, and never abated, although dent creatures of their minds, produced in the the most important person of the drama retained the same lineaments.

It might, at first, seem that his undisguised revelation of feelings and passions, which the becoming pride of human nature, jealous of its own dignity, would in general desire to hold in unviolated silence, could have produced in the

In Byron

His

full freedom of intellectual power.
there does not seem this freedom of power-there
is little appropriation of character to events.
poems, excepting Don Juan, are not full and
complete narrations of any one definite story,
containing within itself a picture of human life.
They are merely bold and turbulent exemplifi-