The dismal snows instead; flake following flake
To cover all the corn. We walk upon

The shadow of hills across a level thrown,
And pant like climbers. Near the alder-brake
We sigh so loud, the nightingale within
Refuses to sing loud, as else she would.

O brothers! let us leave the shame and sin

Of taking vainly, in a plaintive mood,

The holy name of Grief!-holy herein,

That by the grief of One, came all our good."*

I know of nothing that more betrays the moral weakness of Byron, than that he gave so much of his power to spread the contagion of a morbid melancholy, the selfish, thankless, faithless weariness of life, which another womanpoet has justly called a blasphemy:

"Blaspheme not thou thy sacred life, nor turn

O'er joys that God hath for a season lent
Perchance to try thy spirit, and its bent,
Effeminate soul and base, weakly to mourn.
There lies no desert in the land of life,
For e'en that tract that barrenest doth seem,
Laboured of thee in faith and hope, shall teem
With heavenly harvests and rich gatherings, rife.
Haply no more, music and mirth and love,
And glorious things of old and younger art,
Shall of thy days make one perpetual feast:
But when these bright companions all depart,
Lay there thy head upon the ample breast

Of Hope, and thou shalt hear the angels sing above."†

In Lord Byron's portraiture of human character, his genius was prostituted to a worse abuse, in that it confounds and sophisticates the simplicity of consciencebreaks down the barriers between right and wrong, by abating the natural abhorrence of crime, and arraying the

*Sonnet on Exaggeration. Mrs. Browning's Poems, vol. i. p. 344. Poems by Frances Anne Kemble, p. 150.

guilt of even the vilest vice in a false splendour and pride. How different from Shakspeare's genuine morality, so loyal to the best moral instincts, never making vice attractive, not tempting us even to look fondly on the proud and sinful temper until it be chastened by adversity, still less holding up for admiration the moral monsters in whom one virtue is linked with a thousand crimes!

Let me next hasten to notice something of the character of the poetry of Byron, considered as a poet of nature: I mean, of the material world. In the last lecture I had occasion to remark, that it seemed to me a happy circumstance that the great results in physical science did not take place during the low state of religious belief that existed in the last century, but were reserved for a better period of opinion, which could make those results subservient to the cause of truth, instead of being perverted to the uses of materialism. I would now add that, while in our times there has been such active scientific study of nature, happily the poetic culture of nature has been no less earnest, and thus a deeper knowledge of the marvels and the glory of the universe has been promoted both by the processes of analysis and observation, and by the processes of the imagination. Let us see how Byron contributed to this, and what he has done to help his fellowmen to the poetic visions of nature. No poet ever enjoyed larger or more various opportunities of communing with earth and the elements. He was familiar with ocean and lake, with Alpine regions, and with Grecian and Italian lands and skies. He had a quick susceptibility to all that is grand and beautiful in the world of sense, as he wandered over the earth.

"The sounding cataract

Haunted (him) like a passion: the tall rock,

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to (him)
An appetite; a feeling and a love

That had no need of a remoter charm,

By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye."*

But his love of nature was not only passionate; it was thoughtful and imaginative. He knew that true poetic description must go beyond the rapture which mere bodily sight can give, and deal with all of which this material world is symbolical. His strong poetic instincts, when they chanced to be associated with true and healthy feeling, gave forth often grand or beautiful description; he aspired to the highest reach of poetic description of nature, for of himself he said,

"With the stars

And the quick spirit of the universe

He held his dialogues; and they did teach
To him the magie of their mysteries.

To him the book of night was open'd wide,

And the voices from the deep abyss reveal'd
A marvel and a secret."†

But these aspirations were frustrated, for a moral weakness perverted and lowered them, causing an inequality in his poetry which it is lamentable to look at. At one moment we believe that we are about to behold him

"Springing from crystal step to crystal step,

In the bright air, where none can follow him;"‡ but straightway we see the winged energy dragged down

*Wordsworth's Lines written above Tintern Abbey. Works, p. 159. †The Dream, stanza viii.

Landor, Imaginary Conversation, vol. iii. p. 363.

to earth, soiled with earthy things, and stumbling in the darkness and the mire of low and turbid passions. Aspiring to commune with the infinite, the poet's heart, and therefore his genius too, were cramped within the narrow confines of petty pride and weak hatred. The blindness of idolatry came over him. The world of sight and sound became a divinity to him. That which was meant for only a means to higher ends was made all in all to him. The material world, framed as it so wondrously is, to minister not only to our bodily wants, but to the imagi native appetites which feed on the grand and the beautiful, hemmed his faithless pirit in; and the genius of Byron had not power enough to extricate him from the shallow sophistries of materialism. His strong passion for nature, divorcing itself from the vision of faith, began to spread itself in misty rhapsodies, meaningless of every thing but the old errors of sensuous systems of unbelief. When Byron's poetry began to utter materialism, it began to utter folly, and then it ceases to be poetry, for poetry is allied to wisdom, and not to madness. He talked of loving earth only for its earthly sake, "becoming a portion of that around him;" of high mountains being a feeiing to him; and

"That he could see

Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be

A link reluctant in that fleshly chain,

Classed among creatures, when the soul can flee,
And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain

Of ocean, and the stars mingle, and not in vain:

Where elements to elements conform,

And dust is as it should be, shall I not

Feel all I see, less dazzling, but more warm?

The bodiless thought? The spirit of each spot,

Of which, even now, I share at times, the immortal lot."*

Now strip this, and the multitude of passages like it, of all that is fantastic; measure it, as you please, either by the practical rules of common sense, or, by what is more appropriate, the standard of imaginative truth and wisdom, and what is it but the perplexity and the folly of materialism? What natural instinct, let me ask, is so strong in the human heart as that which recoils from the dread anticipation that this living flesh of ours, or the cherished features

those that are dear to us, will be fed upon by the worms in the grave?—a thought that would crush us down in desperate abasement, but for the one bright hope beyond, and then, to think of a poet exulting in the prospect of that remnant of his carnal life "existent happier in the worm!” When Byron is honoured as a great poet of nature, it is well to understand where he will lead his disciple, and where he will desert him. The material world has high and appropriate uses in the building up of our moral being: the study of it, in a right and believing spirit, is full of instruction; but it is worthless and perilous if we lose sight of the great truth of the soul's spiritual supremacy over it; that there is implanted in each human being an undying particle, destined to outlive not this earth alone, but the universe. This poet, "sick of himself for very selfishness," his heart aching with its hollowness, sent his materialized imagination to roam over the world of sense, ocean and mountain, seeking what the world could not

*Childe Harold, canto iii, 72, 74.