something of the same overwhelming cessation of thought and sense as has befallen the miserable, beautiful creature, standing dumb, in agony ineffable, to see destruction overtake the sharer of her sin. The very background glows with a pale flame of passion behind her head, and those wide-opened, motionless eyes. Constance breathes and moves, but Parisina's whole being is arrested like a frozen stream.

The

Another characteristic which helped to secure Byron's instantaneous triumph was one which we have already noted in respect to Scott-his intelligibility the entire absence of the mystic in him. None of those gleams of secret insight into the depths of nature which fill with enthusiasm the sympathetic and understanding, but confuse the crowd, ever flash from the genius of Byron. mysteries with which he deals are purely material, capable of explanation, and affording an easy exercise to the fancy in making them out. This is one of the greatest and most marked distinctions between one class of poetry and another. When we introduce a simple intelligence, say that of a child or an entirely uneducated person, to the wonders and glories of song, there must always be a great deal at which the untrained intelligence will make momentary pause, perplexed by something which has not occurred in the phraseology and thoughts of every day. Who could explain the "Ancient Mariner"? The soul divines, and he that hath an ear to hear, hears and understands but Scott and Byron, the one in a tame, the

other in a grander sense, are both cheerfully intelligible, explainable, making no impossible demand on the faculties of the reader. Nothing could be more mysterious than the "Corsair," but we can hold our breath and guess at those secrets of his with much of the satisfaction which accompanies our ordinary researches into the secrets of our neighbours. There is nothing in them which reaches that region beyond sight, that darkness round us and within, which it is the highest function of the poet to divine, the highest exercise of the mind to search into, catching such glimpses as our faculties will allow. On this, Byron has no communication to make, no light to offer. He is as profane and ignorant as any one of us. himself risks a wondering question before these dark portals, it is with that despairing levity which is the resource of those who fear and know nothing, not of those who love and ponder and by moments see. There is no kindred with the mystic and unknown in the range of his genius; he belongs entirely to the solid earth, and his mysteries are those of the theatre and the tale, nothing greater or more.

When he

We need not enter farther into the incidents which caused his departure from London and the entire breaking up of his life. With these the world would have had little to do at the time had he not taken it into his confidence: but at this distance, when both the chief actors are dead, the story is one which is open to the discussion of all, and cannot be ignored. Domestic convulsions, even when they reach the height of tragedy, can scarcely be without many

petty elements. Byron's Farewell to his wife, which was in everybody's mouth at the time, is a piece of sentimental comedy added on to, and making a pitiful commentary upon, the really tragical crisis which made England and reasonable existence impossible to him thenceforward. That he should have arrived at so terrible a turning point, and, ruined in fortune, bankrupt in reputation, doubted by all and condemned by most of his contemporaries, should have celebrated the conclusion of this tragic episode of life in a strain so commonplace and unreal is as extraordinary as any other of the confusing events of that extraordinary moment. He who took up the interrupted song of "Childe Harold" with so much genuine feeling, how did he, how could he, interpose the sentimental and theatrical romanza of an offended primo tenore between himself and human sympathy? We are told that the manuscript was blurred with his tears, and that there is every reason to suppose him to have been in earnest in the superficial pathos of his appeal to the wife whom he never seems even to have pretended to love—a fact which makes the confusion all the greater, since it is difficult to imagine any serious emotion expressing itself in such verses. But Byron's imagination was, as we have said, much inferior to his genius, and he wanted both good taste and that critical discrimination which has so much to do with personal dignity as well as with excellence in art. He could not divine how such an effusion would be regarded by his contemporaries, and was not even aware of its unreality

until, with an angry illumination afterwards, he discovered the folly of it and perceived too late, through other people's eyes, what he had failed to perceive with his own. But, indeed, the interested reader will hail with a certain relief this crisis in Byron's career. His after life was wild and reckless enough, but it was not so miserable as the forced and fictitious life in London, where ruin lurked at every corner, and the semblance of prosperity and happiness was scarcely skin-deep. It ended in an inevitable explosion, all the elements having worked towards this since the wedding-day on which he had called his new-made wife Miss Milbanke with an absence of mind almost incredible in a young bridegroom. When we read the journal, so full of fictitious liveliness, yet pain, so matter-of-fact, so commonplace, so angry and wretched, with still the same record of trivial things and talk, warped and made miserable by splenetic and reckless sentiment, and the chaos of an unregulated soul, it is with actual satisfaction that we see the end come. When the smoke and ashes clear off, and the passionate pilgrim storms away again over land and sea, leaving the failure and the misery behind him, our minds are eased from a painful burden. The gates of society may be closed against him, but again there seems a chance for him in the wider world.

CHAPTER II.

BYRON-SHELLEY.

WHEN Byron was reaching the stormy climax of his career in London, another poet, younger in years, whose beginning in life had been almost as wayward and unfortunate, though far less guilty, had appeared and disappeared again, not in the brilliant illumination of society, but among the struggling makers of literature in the other end of London. Percy Bysshe Shelley was born, more like a fairy changeling than an ordinary British infant, in a handsome country house in England in 1792, when Byron was but four years old in Aberdeen. The family of the younger child of genius belonged to that rural aristocracy which has produced many men of note and a great deal of respectable stupidity, but few poets; and from the beginning of his life he seems to have been out of tune with everything about him. His father, his family, and surroundings, were as opposite to him in character, hopes, and prejudices, as it is possible to conceive. Where it was that the respectable squire's son imbibed the ideas which dominated his life there seems no record; but he was a revolutionary born, a freethinker from his cradle, atheistical and democratical, in everything going