were taking a cast of the earth's face in plaster, the bare knob of a hill will introduce you to the sun as a comparative stranger. But at sea you may be alone with him day after day, and almost all day long. I never understood before, that nothing short of full day-light can give the supremest sense of solitude.

8. Darkness will not do so, for the imagination peoples it with more shapes than ever were poured from the frozen loins of the populous North. The sun, I sometimes think, is a little grouty at sea, especially at high noon, feeling that he wastes his beams on those fruitless furrows. It is otherwise with the moon. She "comforts the night," as Chapman finely says, and I always found her a companionable creature. 9. In the ocean-horizon I took untiring delight. It is the true magic circle of expectation and conjecture, almost as good as a wishing-ring. What will rise over that edge we sail toward daily and never overtake? A sail? an island? the new shore of the Old World? Something rose every day, which I need not have gone so far to see, but at whose levee I was a much more faithful courtier than on shore.

10. A cloudless sunrise in mid-ocean is beyond comparison for simple grandeur. It is like Dante's style, bare and perfect. Naked sun meets naked sea, the true classic of nature. There may be more sentiment in morning on shore, the shivering fairy-jewelry of dew, the silver pointlace of sparkling hoar-frost,-but there is also more complexity, more of the romantic.

LXXIII. THE SNOW-SHOWER.

WILLIAM C. BRYANT.

1. Stand here by my side, and turn, I pray,
On the lake below, thy gentle eyes;
The clouds hang over it, heavy and gray,
And dark and silent the water lies;
And out of that frozen mist the snow
In wavering flakes begins to flow;
Flake after flake,

They sink in the dark and silent lake.

2. See how in a living swarm they come

From the chambers beyond that misty veil.
Some hover awhile in air, and some

Rush prone from the sky like summer hail.
All, dropping swiftly or settling slow,
Meet and are still in the depth below-
Flake after flake

Dissolved in the dark and silent lake.

3. Here delicate snow-stars, out of the cloud
Come floating downward in airy play,

Like spangles dropped from the glistening crowd,
That whiten by night the milky way;
There broader and burlier masses fall;
The sullen water buries them all-
Flake after flake,

All drowned in the dark and silent lake.

4. And some, as on tender wings they glide

From their chilly birth-cloud, dim and gray,
Are joined in their fall, and, side by side,

Come clinging along their unsteady way,
As friend with friend or husband with wife
Makes, hand in hand, the passage of life;

Each mated flake

Soon sinks in the dark and silent lake.

5. Lo! while we are gazing, in swifter haste Stream down the snows, till the air is white,

As, myriads by myriads madly chased,

They fling themselves from their shadowy height. The fair, frail creatures of middle sky!

What speed they make with their grave so nigh,— Flake after flake

To lie in the dark and silent lake.

6. I see in thy gentle eyes a tear;

They turn to me in sorrowful thought; Thou thinkest of friends, the good and dear, Who were for a time and now are not;

Like these fair children of cloud and frost,
That glisten a moment, and then are lost,
Flake after flake,—

All lost in the dark and silent lake.

7. Yet look again, for the clouds divide ;
A gleam of blue on the water lies;
And, far away on the mountain side,

A sunbeam falls from the opening skies.
But the hurrying host that flew between
The cloud and the water no more is seen-
Flake after flake,

At rest in the dark and silent lake.

LXXIV.—PECULIARITIES OF LORD BYRON.

T. B. MACAULAY.

1. Byron greatly excelled in description and meditation. "Description," as he said in Don Juan, was his "forte." His manner is indeed peculiar, and is almost unequaledrapid, sketchy, full of vigor; the selection happy ; the strokes few and bold. Wordsworth is accustomed to gaze on nature with the eye of a lover-to dwell on every feature, and to mark every change of aspect. Those beauties which strike the most negligent observer, and those which only a close attention discovers, are equally familiar to him, and are equally prominent in his poetry. The proverb of old Hesiod, that half is often more than the whole, is eminently applicable to description. The policy of the Dutch, who cut down most of the precious trees in the Spice Islands, in order to raise the value of what remained, was a policy which poets would do well to imitate. It was a policy which no poet understood better than Lord Byron. Whatever his faults might be, he was never, while his mind retained its vigor, accused of prolixity.

2. His descriptions, great as was their intrinsic merit, derived their principal interest from the feeling which always mingled with them. He was himself the beginning, the middle, and the end of all his own poetry, the hero of every tale,

the chief object in every landscape. Harold, Lara, Manfred, and a crowd of other characters, were universally considered merely as loose incognitos of Byron; and there is every reason to believe that he meant them to be so considered. The wonders of the outer world, the Tagus with the mighty fleets of England riding on its bosom, the towers of Cintra overhanging the shaggy forest of cork-trees and willows, the glaring marble of Pentelicus, the banks of the Rhine, the glaciers of Clarens, the sweet lake of Leman, the dell of Egeria with its summer birds and rustling lizards, the shapeless ruins of Rome overgrown with ivy and wall-flowers, the stars, the sea, the mountains-all were mere accessories— the background to one dark and melancholy figure.

3. Never had any writer so vast a command of the whole eloquence of scorn, misanthropy, and despair. That Marah was never dry. No art could sweeten, no draughts could exhaust, its perennial waters of bitterness. Never was there such variety in monotony as that of Byron. From maniac laughter to piercing lamentation, there was not a single note of human anguish of which he was not master. Year after year, and month after month, he continued to repeat, that to be wretched is the destiny of all; that to be eminently wretched is the destiny of the eminent; that all the desires by which we are cursed lead alike to misery ;—if they are not gratified, to the misery of disappointment; if they are gratified, to the misery of satiety.

4. His principal heroes are men who have arrived by different roads at the same goal of despair, who are sick of life, who are at war with society, who are supported in their anguish only by an unconquerable pride, resembling that of Prometheus on the rock, or of Satan in the burning marl; who can master their agonies by the force of their will, and who, to the last, defy the whole power of earth and heaven. He always described himself as a man of the same kind with his favorite creations, as a man whose heart had been withered, whose capacity for happiness was gone and could not be restored; but whose invincible spirit dared the worst that could befall him here or hereafter.

5. How much of this morbid feeling sprung from an original disease of mind, how much from real misfortune,

how much from the nervousness of dissipation, how much of it was fanciful, how much of it was merely affected, it is impossible for us, and would probably have been impossible for the most intimate friends of Lord Byron, to decide. Whether there ever existed, or can ever exist, a person answering to the description which he gave of himself, may be doubted; but that he was not such a person is beyond all doubt.

6. It is ridiculous to imagine that a man whose mind was really imbued with scorn of his fellow-creatures, would have published three or four books every year in order to tell them so; or that a man who could say with truth that he neither sought sympathy nor needed it, would have admitted all Europe to hear his farewell to his wife, and his blessings on his child. In the second canto of Childe Harold, he tells us that he is insensible to fame and obloquy:

"Ill may such contest now the spirit move,

Which heeds nor keen reproof nor partial praise."

Yet we know, on the best evidence, that a day or two before he published these lines, he was greatly, indeed childishly, elated by the compliments paid to his maiden speech in the House of Lords.

7. We are far, however, from thinking that his sadness was altogether feigned. He was naturally a man of great sensibility; he had been ill educated; his feelings had been early exposed to sharp trials; he had been crossed in his boyish love; he had been mortified by the failure of his first literary efforts; he was straitened in pecuniary circumstances; he was unfortunate in his domestic relations; the public treated him with cruel injustice; his health and spirits suffered from his dissipated habits of life; he was, on the whole, an unhappy man. He early discovered that, by parading his unhappiness before the multitude, he excited an unrivaled interest. The world gave him every encouragement to talk about his mental sufferings. The effect which his first confessions produced, induced him to affect much that he did not feel; and the affectation probably reacted on his feelings. How far the character in which he