The present translations are extremely unequal: those in blank verse are the most pleasing. The sixth Elegy however, is versified with considerable spirit and elegance; but the close of the poem is, we are compelled to remark, a complete violation of the spirit of the original. The paciferum regem, 'faustáque sacratis sæcula pacta libris,' is most inadequately rendered, and gives the character of paganism to the whole passage.

In justice to our Translator we must make room for a specimen of his blank heroic verse. It is an extract from the poem

on Nature unimpaired by Age.

Shall then fair Nature's visage, furrow'd deep,
Confess the hand of Age; and through long years
Our universal parent feel decay?

Old and unfruitful will she tremble then
And palsied shake her star-encircled brows?
Shall the waste hunger of devouring years,
Despoil the beauty of the sphery train
Sunk in obscure old age? Shall ruthless Time,
Insatiate, devour the very heav'ns,
And feed upon the bowels of his sire?
Ah, why did Jove, improvident, neglect
To guard against such ill, and give his works
Endless duration? Then a time must come
(That awful period) when, with rushing sound
Tremendous, the arch'd vault of heav'n shall fall,
Jove and his tow'rs descend, and Pallas arm'd
With Gorgon shield, be thrown from her abode
As from his seat maternal Juno's son

Fell headlong on th' Ægean isle? And thou,
O glorious Sun!-- thou too shalt imitate,

Sad Phaeton's course, and drive thy flaming car
Prone to swift ruin; Nerëus shall smoke,
Extinguishing thy fiery orb, and fill

With mournful hissings all the wond'ring deep.
Then airy Hæmus, from its rooted base
Uptorn, shall fall, and vast Ceraunia's rocks,
Once by the giant brood hurl'd against heav'n,
Sinking to hell's profound abyss, impress
The gloomy monarch of the shades with fear.

But otherwise Omnipotence, divine,
Ordain'd; and plann'd this universal frame
With stronger counsel.' pp. 71-73.

Art. XI. 1. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto the Third. By Lord Byron. 8vo. pp. 80. Price 5s. 6d. Murray. 1816.

2. The Prisoners of Chillon, and other Poems. By Lord Byron. 8vo. pp. 62. Price 5s. 6d. Murray. 1816.

THE

HERE is a stanza in the third Canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, referring to Rousseau, which so exquisitely expresses all that the most laboured critique could say of these productions, taken in connexion with the private circumstances to which they explicitly allude, that it were almost sufficient to transcribe them, and leave our readers to make the application. 'Here the self-torturing sophist, ......... he who threw

Enchantment over passion, and from woe
Wrung overwhelming eloquence, first drew
The breath which made him wretched: yet he knew
How to make madness beautiful, and cast

O'er erring deeds and thoughts, a heavenly hue

Of words, like sunbeams, dazzling as they past

The eyes, which o'er them shed tears feelingly and fast.?

With whatsoever sentiments respecting the Author as a member of society, (in which character his Lordship has made the public his confidant,) a person may sit down to the perusal of these poems, it will be impossible, if he has a human heart, not to have his judgement disarmed by his feelings, and to be dazzled even to tears. The very first line strikes upon the heart with the thrilling effect of a sudden knell: the knell of an unhappy being self-exiled from the living interests of society, rung by his own returning spirit, as if to compel our sympathy. 'Is thy face like thy mother's, my fair child! Ada! sole daughter of my house and heart?

When last I saw thy young blue eyes they smiled,
And then we parted,-not as now we part,

But with a hope.

Awaking with a start,

The waters heave around me; and on high

The winds lift up their voices; I depart

Whither I know not; but the hour's gone by

When Albion's lessening shores could grieve or glad mine eye.'

Did it form any part of our duty to the public, to make these poems serve as an occasion for instituting an inquiry into Lord Byron's domestic conduct, we certainly could not accept his eloquence as a witness in the cause, or suffer our verdict to be influenced by the impression he succeeds in making on our feelings. We could not suffer ourselves to forget that Ada has another parent, and that that mother's silent wrongs

might be such as to out-plead the most pathetic appeals of the father. But living, as happily we do, remote from the sphere of Lord Byron's

'self-sought foes

'Or friends by himself banished,'

we feel ourselves by no means called upon either to become his apologists, or to sit as his censors; not having had the privilege of personal intimacy which our fellow Journalists may have enjoyed, to warrant our assuming the office of the friend, and having no feelings to gratify by the execution of a sterner task.

Lord Byron has indeed, in these poems, invited the attention of the public to his own peculiar character and fortunes. He has the air of a man that at once courts and disdains the vote of the many, on which his fame depends. He seems willing to receive from the impersonal multitude that homage of sympathy, which perhaps he would be too proud to accept from an individual who could answer or gaze upon the speaker. The species of egotism, however, which pervades his Lordship's productions, appears less like the display of his own feelings, than the effect of their perpetually haunting him, intercepting and colouring his view of every other object, and rendering it impossible for him to forget

the weary dream

Of selfish grief or gladness.'

In the present Canto, Childe Harold is scarcely to be recognised as an ideal personage. We almost question, indeed, whether Lord Byron has not thought too long and darkly' on one real person, to be capable of giving birth to a purely imaginary being, the independent sportive creation of fancy. We question whether any of Lord Byron's characters are strictly fictitious; for whatever variation of costume is thrown over them, and whatever are the circumstances of the tale, it is still the same combination of morbid feelings and phrensied passions, aggravated into various degrees of guilt, which is personified in the successive avatars of his Lordship's genius; and all the subordinate personages of the drama have the same relation to that one, as the gaudy clouds of evening have to the sun which imparts to them their interesting hues: they are only shadowy outlines which serve to express, in the symbolic language of poetry, the objects of passionate emotion and of remembrances not unreal. Medora, the most lovely and interesting by far of these cloud-like phantoms, is not an individual, but an abstraction in the form of woman; her whole character consists in being that which Conrad loved. And Conrad himself, and Lara, and Alp, and Harold, are but the varied expression VOL. VII. N. S.

2 A

of one class of feelings condensed as it were into one vivid
conception in the mind of the poet. On this one image, thus
multiplied in the fantastic reflections of thought, it seems to be
the highest intellectual solace for the Author to fix the intent
gaze of his imagination; not like Narcissus, enamoured of the
reflection of himself, but losing in the contemplation of that
social shadow, the conscious wretchedness of the original.
Tis to create, and in creating live

A being more intense, that we endow
With form our fancy, gaining as we give
The life we image.'

But that very passion for intensity of feeling, which is the unhappy characteristic of Lord Byron's mind, renders him incapable of taking pleasure in the creation of imaginary beings from the purer elements of fancy, and the ordinary materials of humanity. If any thing has power to banish for a moment the ever present thought of self, which like an external presence seems to haunt him, it must be of a nature too horrible, too agonizing to be simply pleasing, or else of that commanding sublimity which suspends, as by physical force, our individual recollections, lulling them to sleep amid the music of nobler thoughts.' Of the power of natural scenery to produce this adequate excitement, and to hold the faculties in a trance-like oblivion of the insignificant interests of this world, no one appears to be more deeply susceptible than the Author of these poems; and few have succeeded so well in breathing an intellectual soul into the inanimate forms of grandeur, power, and beauty he describes. The following stanza presents a striking instance. • But these recede. Above me are the Alps, The palaces of Nature, whose vast walls Have pinnacled in clouds their snowy scalps, And throned eternity in icy halls

Of cold sublimity, where forms and falls
The avalanche – the thunderbolt of snows!
All that expands the spirit, yet appals,
Gather around these summits, as to show

How earth may pierce to heaven, yet leave «ain man below.’ The descriptive power displayed in the next specimen we shall transcribe, is of the very highest order of excellence. Wordsworth, whose strength lies in enduing materiality with intelligence, has nothing finer of the kind.

'Clear, placid Leman! thy contrasted lake,
With the wide world I dwell in, is a thing
Which warns me, with its stillness, to forsake
Earth's troubled waters for a purer spring.

This quiet sail is as a noiseless wing

To waft me from distraction; once I loved
Torn ocean's roar, but thy soft murmuring
Sounds sweet as if a sister's voice reproved,

That I with stern delights should e'er have been so moved.
"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,
Our destinies o'erleap their mortal state,
And claim a kindred with you; for ye are
A beauty and a mystery, and create

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 lull'd lake and mountain-coast,
All is concentered 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.

The sky is changed!-and such a change! Oh night, And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong, Yet 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 hath found a tongue,