For the blithe archers look in vain!
Broken, dispersed, in flight o'er ta'en,

Pierced through, trod down, by thousands slain,
They cumber Bannock's bloody plain.'

Scott was a warm patriot, and his poems have constantly occurring lines which speak his love of country-his dear native Scotland. You all must know, I think, those familiar lines beginning,

"Lives there a man with soul so dead;

Who never to himself has said,

This is my own, my native land?"

which open a canto of the Lay of the Last Minstrel.

Another extract from Lady of the Lake has this address to his country's harp, which you can compare with Moore's song to the harp of his native land, which we have before read:

66

Harp of the North, farewell! the hills grow dark,
On purple peaks a deeper shade descending;
In twilight copse the glow-worm lights her spark,
The deer, half-seen, are to the covert wending.
Resume thy wizard elm! the fountain lending
And the wild breeze thy wilder minstrelsy,
Thy numbers sweet with nature's vespers blending,
With distant echoes from the fold and lea,

And herd-boy's evening pipe, and hum of housing bee.

"Yet once again, farewell, thou minstrel harp.
Yet once again, forgive my feeble sway,
And little reck I of the censure sharp,
May idle cavil at an idle lay.

Much have I owed thy strains on life's long way;
Through secret woes the world has never known,
When on the weary night dawned wearier day,

And bitterer was the grief devoured alone,
That I survive such woes, Enchantress, is thine own.
"Hark! as my lingering footsteps slow retire,

Some spirit of the air has waked thy string!
'Tis now a seraph bold, with touch of fire,
'Tis now the brush of Fairy's frolic wing.
Receding now the dying numbers ring

Fainter and fainter down the rugged dell:
And now the mountain breezes scarcely bring

A wandering witch-note of the distant spell—

And now 'tis silent all! Enchantress, fare-thee-well!”

Two years after the Lay of the Last Minstrel appeared and was read with such delight, a little volume called Hours of Idleness, by George Gordon Byron, a young Born 1788. nobleman of nineteen, was reviewed in one of the Died 1824. magazines with terrible criticism. Mr. Jeffrey, the editor of the Edinburgh Review, the same critic who had lashed with his pen the poets of the Lake School, now attacked this budding poet. It is true, that the Hours of Idleness was not a collection of master-pieces of poetry, but there was enough of the promise of the genius which Byron showed afterwards, to make us feel indignant that Jeffrey could not have been more generous to the young writer. If Byron had been too sensitive to rally from the attack, his genius might have been crushed by such severity. But he was not a man to sit down in silence and take abuse, and had a strong tendency to hit back again. He answered Jeffrey in a satire in verse called English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, which was so strong that nobody could doubt the ability of the man who wrote it.

In this satire he was himself severe on the Lake Poets, gave Walter Scott some hard knocks, and praised Campbell, Crabbe and Rogers, as the poets of the old classic school of Pope, whom Byron fancied he thought the great poet. In spite of all this, Byron belonged by temper and genius to the new school of poets, and was much more revolutionary in temper than any of them.

In all he wrote one sees he was a child of the age in which the French Revolution had raged. The tempests in his poetry would have torn to tatters the orderly verses of Mr. Pope, or any of the others whom Byron praised so highly.

After his tilt with the bards and reviewers, he went to Italy and there wrote the first part of Childe Harold—his best poem. When he went to see his London publisher, on

his return from Italy, he showed him some translations from the Latin poet Horace, as the great occupation of his absence, the work of which he was justly proud. The publisher, rather disappointed at this, asked if he had nothing original, on which he rather unwillingly produced the first cantos of Childe Harold. The quick eye of the business man saw its merit; it was printed at once, and Byron says, "I awoke one morning and found myself famous." There was no doubt in the mind of critics of the old or new order about such poetry as this:

"Clear, placid Leman! thy contrasted lake,
With the wild world I dwelt 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 darkened Jura, whose capped 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 brake
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 distil,
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 lulled lake and mountain coast,

All is concentrated 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 defense.

"Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt

In solitude, where we are least alone;

A truth which through our being then doth melt,
And purifies from self; it is a tone,

The soul and source of music, which makes known
Eternal harmony, and sheds a charm

Like to the fabled Cytherea's zone,

Binding all things with beauty; 'twould disarm

The spectre death, had he substantial power to harm.

"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,
And Jura answers, through her misty shroud
Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud!

"Sky, mountains, river, winds, lake, lightnings! ye
With night, and clouds, and thunder, and a soul
To make these felt and feeling, well may be
Things that have made me watchful. The far roll
Of your departing voices is the knell

Of what in me is sleepless-if I rest.

But where of ye, oh tempests! is the goal?

In his poetry, Byron warmly took the cause of Greece, which was then making an effort to free herself from the Turks. In Childe Harold, and in other poems, some grand passages are addressed to struggling Greece. The year before his death he entered into the plans of the Greek leaders in a war for their country's independence, and went to live at Missolonghi, where he mustered a band of soldiers in his own pay. Overwork, and the bad climate, threw him into a fever, and he was urged to leave the air of Missolonghi, which was malarious, and go elsewhere to recover. He refused, saying he would remain till Greece was either free or hopelessly subdued. He died soon after, at his post there, in the prime of life and genius. He used to say he had up to that time written only for women; in the last of his life he would write for men. Would he had been spared to do

even greater things than Childe Harold.

TALK LV.

ON PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

BETWEEN Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who were personal friends, there is a kind of resemblance Born 1792. in their lives, although they were men very unlike Died 1822. in character. They were both of noble birth, both held opinions very different from most young men in their position, and they won a similar reputation in their social circle, where their characters and their poetry were looked on by the conservative portion as dangerous and grossly immoral.

Shelley had first drawn blame on himself in college, when he was barely twenty, by some publication which was condemned as atheistic; and he was expelled, finally, from Oxford. Much that he did later, confirmed the bad character this gave him in the eyes of respectable and well