The The composition of Don Juan was stopped half way, at the prayer of Madame Guiccioli, but afterwards resumed. Probably it was intended to be much longer, or at least the poet did not intend that his Pegasus should run away with him into those wide digressions of sharp wit and superficial philosophy, abuse, and scandal, which form the greater part of the poem, and had meant to make his hero illustrate the life of various countries in a much longer succession of adventures. But though his genius had not failed, his life had begun to flag; and to all appearance he let himself be carried away on the current of facile and brilliant verse without taking count where he was going. Probably he was aware that he had lost himself and his purpose, and therefore stopped abruptly with the sudden sensation of impatience and self-disgust which overtook easily a mind so little assured of itself, though so rash and obstinate by times. graver composition of the plays went on at the same time, and so did the heavy and solemn Prophecy of Dante, and his translation of an unreadable Italian poem the Morgante Maggiore of Pulci, to which, with his usual strange misapprehension of his own powers, he attached the greatest importance. Pulei was, in his own opinion, the fountainhead from which he got that new, spring of poetry which he had essayed in Beppo, and made famous in Don Juan. It was the rhyme of Hookham Frere's poem of Whistlecraft, already referred to; but Byron would not consent to follow the inspiration of Frere. "Pulci," he says, "is the parent not only of Whistlecraft, but of all jocose Italian poetry." He did not succeed in interesting Englishmen in this great original, but he made the "light horse gallop" of the measure to be supereminently successful for the discursive treatment he loved, and this was a better demonstration of its merits than any obsolete Italian could have given. According to all the rules of growth and development, it should have been Juan who came first out of the burning fermenting brain of the young poet, and Childe Harold, which followed later, out of his maturing mind. and calmer intelligence. Had it been so, Byron might perhaps have lived and expanded into greater work and better fame; but this, unhappily, was not the course of his genius. We have already spoken of the early cantos of Childe Harold which brought him at a bound to the very pinnacles of fame. If these first bursts of a poetry still vague and half awakened had so great an effect upon the public mind, what must have been the sensation produced when, flying from real ruin and overthrow, the catastrophe which ended all better hope for him, and made him doubly defiant of a world which he believed had used him so hardly-the passionate pilgrim dashed forth once more over the sea into the unknown, full of anguish and resistance, but with every power heightened, and life itself running doubly strong in his veins? the third canto, the new beginning of this great poem, Byron attains his climax. He has never been so near our sympathies, never so near the deeper secrets of life. For the first time he comes within the range of influences more penetrating and sacred than the passions and semifictitious despair of his youth. The air is tremulous about him with a possible conversion. It seems to hang on the poise of a breath, whether the perverse, headstrong, capricious, undisciplined soul may not seek refuge, with its wounds and smarting sense of wrong and misery, amid the soft ministrations of nature, in the grateful stillness of hills and waters, of simplicity and peace. Now and then this possibility seems so near that it is all but realised. The contrast of the "clear placid Leman" with the wild world he has abandoned In "Warns me with its stillness to forsake He feels the infinity stir around him as he stands in that solitude where he is least alone; the quiet sail is as a noiseless wing" carrying him away from all impure distractions. "Are not the mountains, waves, and skies a part of me and of my soul?" he asks in that musing mood, which never was so profound and tender: “And thus I am absorb'd, and this is life ; With a fresh pinion; which I feel to spring, The poet never realised these wavering possibilities. Other influences were too many for him. He went back to the wretched elements of life, and sank down from those dawnings of a higher soul to vulgar passion and vulgarer trite cynicism and philosophy. But we have the best of Byron in the last half of the Pilgrimage. Everything is stimulated in him: his perceptions, his natural feelings, his capability of thought, and the more liquid and larger music of his verse. CHAPTER III. SHELLEY-BYRON. SHELLEY and his companions left Lake Leman in the end of the summer of 1816, leaving Lord Byron there to pursue his course southwards a little later. In November of that same year the tragic incidents to which we have before alluded threw gloom and additional reproach upon the life of the younger poet. Harriet, his young wife, whom he had abandoned nearly two years before, and who in the interval had not lived too wisely or purely, according to the vague accounts given of her by the biographers of Shelley, committed suicide. That this miserable event gave him intense pain almost all agree; as indeed it is impossible to imagine that a being so sensitive could have been indifferent to such a catastrophe. But it certainly cleared his path of an incumbrance, and in six weeks after, his connection with Mary Godwin was legitimatised by marriage. Thus the theory of Godwin's philosophical sect against marriage as an institution was finally disposed of. Godwin himself had married more than once, notwithstanding his opinions. Shelley, in honourable superiority to them, had married Harriet when she put herself in his power; but the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, already his unwedded companion, might have helped him to maintain his theoretical standard of superiority to all bonds of law, if ever woman could. The pair, however, visionary as they were, followed the beaten way of law and order, against which they had rebelled, as soon as it was open to them; and in this act the last spark of energy and meaning which remained in the lawless little band of sectarians died out. Sacred or not, the institution was too necessary, too expedient, to be rejected when the penalties of rebellion were fully realised. Even in his grief for the catastrophe which swept poor Harriet out of his path, Shelley, it is said, maintained his innocence of all blame in respect to the poor girl who had thus taken her fate in her own hands. They were all pitifully young, which is almost their only excusethat and their philosophy together. For youth is cruel, without meaning it, notwithstanding that it is easy of access to all emotions. Its own affairs bulk so largely, its own feelings preoccupy it so entirely, that it is hard to give due consideration, from any other point of view, to the obstacles in its way. A little later occurred an incident to which more importance has been attached by all Shelley's biographers and apologists than the death of poor Harriet. "Meanwhile," says Mr. Rossetti, the last of these defenders of the poet's memory, with fine irony, "a Chancery suit had been commenced to determine whether Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley or Mr. Westbrook (Harriet's father) was the more proper person to elicit such intellectual or moral faculties, as the ruling power of the universe might have gifted the poet's two children with. In the eyes of a bandaged Justice the retired hotelkeeper proved to be clearly better fitted for this function than the author in esse of Alastor and in posse of the Triumph of Life." From this inflated statement of the case the reader will derive little real information. Harriet had left two children: one a little girl a year old at the time her husband forsook her, the other a boy born after their separation, and whom Shelley had never seen. The chil |