I cannot paint her-something I had seen Her face, where face appeared, was amply spread, The flower's fictitious bloom, the blushing of the dead: My view of both-the sameness and the change, It is the creature whom I loved, and yet Or now despised! the worshipped or deplored! "Whom I have loved;" but Prudence whispered, Nay, And Folly grew ashamed-Discretion had her day. If words had failed, a look explained their style; She could not blush assent, but she could smile: Good heaven! I thought, have I rejected fame, Credit, and wealth, for one who smiles at shame? She saw me thoughtful-saw it, as I guessed, With some concern, though nothing she expressed. "Come, my dear friend, discard that look of care," &c. Thus spoke the siren in voluptuous style, While I stood gazing and perplexed the while, Chained by that voice, confounded by that smile. And then she sang, and changed from grave to gay, Till all reproach and anger died away. "My Damon was the first to wake The gentle flame that cannot die; The faithful bosom's softest sigh: O cast it from thy thought away; Or say that nought is done amiss; For who the dangerous path can shun And then she moved my pity; for she wept, Softened, I said, "Be mine the hand and heart, She felt the truth upon her spirits press, Pleasures that brought disgust yet brought relief, There came at length request That I would see a wretch with grief oppressed, It frightened me!-I thought, and shall not I Still as I went came other change the frame And still the breathing, we exclaimed-"Tis death! I sat and his last gentle stroke espied : Bringing back all that my young heart impressed! From Moore, whose works are more, probably, than those of any of his contemporaries in the hands of all readers of poetry, we will make only one short extract. Here is the exquisitely beautiful description in the Fire Worshippers, the finest of the four tales composing Lalla Rookh, of the calm after a storm, in which the heroine, the gentle Hinda, awakens in the war-bark of her lover Hafed, the noble Gheber chief, into which she had been transferred from her own galley while she had swooned with terror from the tempest and the fight:— How calm, how beautiful comes on When, 'stead of one unchanging brecze Of lovers' hearts when newly blest- Beneath no rich pavilion's shade, And some, who seemed but ill to brook That sluggish calm, with many a look As loose it flagged before the mast. Crabbe, born in 1754, lived till 1832; Campbell, born in 1777, died in 1844; Moore, born in 1780, died in 1851. BYRON. Byron was the writer whose blaze of popularity it mainly was that threw Scott's name into the shade, and induced him to abandon verse. Yet the productions which had this effect-the Giaour, the Bride of Abydos, the Corsair, &c., published in 1813 and 1814 (for the new idolatry was scarcely kindled by the two respectable, but somewhat tame, cantos of Childe Harold, in quite another style, which appeared shortly before these effusions), were, in reality, only poems written in what may be called a variation of Scott's own manner-Oriental lays and romances, Turkish Marmions and Ladies of the Lake. The novelty of scene and subject, the exaggerated tone of passion in the outlandish tales, and a certain trickery in the writing (for it will hardly now be called anything else), materially aided by the mysterious interest attaching to the personal history of the noble bard, who, whether he sung of Giaours, or Corsairs, or Laras, was always popularly believed to be "himself the great sublime he drew," wonderfully excited and intoxicated the public mind at first, and for a time made all other poetry seem spiritless and wearisome; but, if Byron had adhered to the style by which his fame was thus originally made, it probably would have proved transient enough. Few will now be found to assert that there is anything in these earlier poems of his comparable to the great passages in those of Scott-to the battle in Marmion, for instance, or the raising of the clansmen by the fiery cross in the Lady of the Lake, or many others that might be mentioned. But Byron's vigorous and elastic genius, although it had already tried various styles of poetry, was, in truth, as yet only preluding to its proper display. First, there had been the very small note of the Hours of Idleness; then, the sharper, but not more original or much more promising, strain of the English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (a satirical attempt in all respects inferior to Gifford's Baviad and Mæviad, of which it was a slavish imitation); next, the certainly far higher and more matured, but still quiet and commonplace, manner of the first two cantos of Childe Harold; after that, suddenly the false glare and preternatural vehemence of these Oriental rhapsodies, which yet, however, with all their hollowness and extravagance, evinced infinitely more power than anything he had previously done, or rather were the only poetry he had yet produced that gave proof of any remarkable poetic genius. The Prisoner of Chillon and Parisina, The Siege of Corinth and Mazeppa, followed, all in a spirit of far more truth, and depth, and beauty than the other tales that had preceded them; but the highest forms of Byron's poetry must be sought for in the two concluding cantos of Childe Harold, and in what else he wrote in the last seven or eight years of his short life. SHELLEY. Yet the greatest poetical genius of this time, if it was not that of Coleridge, was, probably, that of Shelley. Byron died in |