of it, as if he had heard it glowing from the lips of the spectator: it is eloquence of the highest kind. On the other hand, those pictures of natural scenery which in Byron's earlier days had been somewhat vague and conventional, have taken a new intensity and reality of life. The following landscape, the very background of land and water upon which the life of the two poets was set, we select almost at random among many. Everything is in it, sound and sight, and the sentiment of the summer night with all its exquisite sensations and associations.

"It is the hush of night, and all between

Thy margin and the mountains, dusk, yet clear,
Mellowed and mingling, yet distinctly seen,
Save darken'd Jura, whose capt heights appear
Precipitously steep; and drawing near,
There breathes a living fragrance from the shore
Of flowers yet fresh with childhood; on the ear
Drops the light drip of the suspended oar,
Or chirps the grasshopper one good-night carol more;

"He is an evening reveller, who makes

His life an infancy, and sings his fill;

At intervals, some bird from out the brakes
Starts into voice a moment, then is still.
There seems a floating whisper on the hill;
But that is fancy, for the starlight dews
All silently their tears of love instil,
Weeping themselves away, till they infuse
Deep into nature's breast the spirit of her hues.

"Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven,

If in your bright leaves we would read the fate
Of men and empires,-'tis to be forgiven,
That in our aspirations to be great,

VOL. III.

F

In us such love and reverence from afar,

That fortune, fame, power, life, have named themselves a star.

"All heaven and earth are still-though not in sleep

But breathless as we grow when feeling most;
And silent, as we stand in thoughts too deep:

All heaven and earth are still :-from the high host
Of stars, to the lulled lake and mountain-coast,

All is concentred in a life intense,

Where not a beam, nor air, nor leaf is lost,
But hath a part of being, and a sense

Of that which is of all Creator and defence."

If it were not that the soft purity and sweetness of this picture is invaded and disturbed beyond remedy by the other features of the story, we might be tempted to forgive all that was included within the framework of this lovely scene; and, putting aside the ugly facts of the story, the intercourse of these two young poets, their prolonged and endless talk, the mutual stimulation of minds so extraordinary, has an interest which nothing can take from it. They were both in the earliest chapter of manhood, though one of them had already wrecked the prospects of his life, and the other set himself at variance with every authority, and transgressed at least one primary law of nature. Lawless and defiant of all rule, yet hot and indignant that the society they outraged should have pronounced against them, they stood beneath the pitying heavens, the most nobly endowed of all their generation-two rebel angels, beautiful, fortunate, un

happy; everything in nature ministering to them, offering of its best; with faculties within them rich enough to atone for every privation, yet enduring none -proud voluntary outcasts, revolted kings of men.

On one of these wanderings, detained for a couple of days by rain and stormy weather in little Ouchy by the waterside, not far from the sober coquetries of Lausanne, where Gibbon has left his formal memory, Byron wrote the Prisoner of Chillon, one of the most perfect and purest of his poems, but perhaps the least like his of anything that ever came from his hand. It is the one grand tribute which the great rebel of the age paid to Wordsworth, its greatest yet most strongly - resisted influence; and why that shadow should have touched and stilled his spirit just at this tumultuous moment, who can tell? It is one of the strangest caprices of his genius. Chillon, where it stands projected into the silent blueness of the lake, with its oubliettes, its dungeons, and those gloomy openings into the water that suggest many a nameless victim, has no doubt a dark and eventful history; but this little poem is its record to the world, and nobody, now at least, asks further. No one of Byron's poems is so purely narrative, or has such a unity of lofty and tender interest, uninterrupted by a single distracting image. But this very perfection makes it tame and cold among the heat and animation of the rest: it is the only one in which Byron is left out. No Harold smiles or strides between the massive pillars. For once the conception of a being, who is not himself, has entered his mind, an atmosphere of love and reverence

and acknowledgment of the sanctities of human affection. We might be beguiled into a speculation whether some wavering of the compass towards virtue and truth, some vague comprehension of the secret of a higher happiness had come to him from that calm of nature; but there is no record elsewhere of any such pause in the force of the torrent which was his life.

Byron was not always in this chastened and purified mood; but he was in great intellectual activity during this period, his mind thrilling with new life and passion. He composed The Dream-that curious picturesque sentimental review of his own life, and insinuation of a remote and inadequate cause for all its imperfections-at the same time; and also the address To Augusta, and several other detached poems, all eloquent, animated, and fine. On the other hand, it would not be difficult to find episodes which are full of glittering rhetoric and little more. Of these is the well-known description of the storm among the mountains:

"The sky is changed!—and such a change! Oh night,
And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong,
But lovely in your strength, as is the light
Of a dark eye in woman! Far along,
From peak to peak, the rattling crags among,

Leaps the live thunder! Not from one lone cloud,
But every mountain now has found a tongue,
And Jura answers, through her misty shroud,
Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud!

"And this is in the night :-Most glorious night!
Thou wert not made for slumber! let me be
A sharer in thy fierce and far delight,-

A portion of the tempest and of thee!
How the lit lake shines, a phosphoric sea,
And the big rain comes dancing to the earth!
And now again 'tis black,-and now, the glee
Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain-mirth,
As if they did rejoice o'er a young earthquake's birth."

Another curious production of the two poetic households must here be noted. Lewis, popularly known as Monk Lewis, paid Byron a visit at his villa, and became one of the little society, which was often confined within four walls by the rain, and eager after every new excitement, as people imprisoned in a country house so universally are. They told each other ghost stories, and tales of mystery and wonder under the inspiration of the kind little inoffensive romancer, who was then master of that branch of the arts; and he or some one else suggested that they should all write for their mutual diversion tales of this character. The only one who carried out the suggestion was Mary, the youngest of the party, a girl not yet eighteen, notwithstanding the turmoil of life into which she had been plunged. That a young creature of this age should have produced anything at once so horrible and so original as the hideous romance of Frankenstein, is one of the most extraordinary accidents in literature; and that she should never, having made such a beginning, have done anything more, is almost equally wonderful. Byron is said to have begun a similar sketch, entitled The Vampyre, which his physician-attendant, Polidori, afterwards added to and printed; but none of the detailed records of the time