the courtly hall, and jewelled figures move stately through the dance. These sweep past and there float into the mirror's magic deeps the grand forms of a mountain land; the cataract leaping to music from the precipice, river hastening to meet river with bridal kiss, and the lake, bearing on its bosom bright island gems, lying placid beneath the crag. Presently, at a sudden turn of the mountain path, there emerges the knight of chivalry, pride and dauntlessness on his brow, a smile of kingly gentleness on his lip. Startled by the sound of his huntsman's horn, the Lady of the Lake, fair as a vision, glides in her skiff, from the glassy deep, into some silvery cove. The scene swims gradually away, and thick clouds, rolling slow before the blast, gather on the moorland, to hang their dim curtains round opposing armies. The battle commences. The pomp and circumstance of feudal war, the plumes, the pennons, the mail-clad steeds, are before us, every form lifted into full, distinct light, and the war cries ringing round. Thus we truly represent to ourselves the poetry of Scott: where all is clear, vivid, instinct with life and motion; where there floats not one cloud of dishonest obscurity, not one film of affected sensibility; where a thousand tints of loveliness glance and gleam before our eyes, like dew drops in clear dawn, or sunbeams on wavering foliage; where the nice definition of form, the elaborate refinement and richness of color, the studied and perfect symmetry, pertaining to the ideal of Greece and of Goethe, are indeed wanting, but where sympathy and love, rejoicing in dewy copse and sparkling flower, in golden corn and smiling meadow, in bounding stream and purple mountain, have become the unconscious ministers of a high artistic perfection, but shed over all a vivacity, an airy sprightliness, a smiling grace, such as

were perhaps never won by the more conscious efforts of Art.

Remove from the poetry of Scott the vail of remoteness and enchantment; for that softly glittering morning light, substitute a fierce red glare; let the spirit of the modern time be breathed in its utmost intensity over every scene and into every character; let skilful narrative give place to grand lyric bursts, and sympathetic memory, exhaustless in its stores, to the poetic imagination in its highest might: and for the poetry of Scott you have the poetry of Byron. Passionate, vivid, excitable, sensitive, Byron was the ideal embodiment of lyric poetry. His personality was too intense to permit him to separate himself from his poetic characters, so as to represent them in the whole breadth and symmetry of their relations, in the fashion of a Shakspeare or a Scott. He has himself incidentally informed us that he regarded poetry from the lyrical point of view. "No poetry," he says, in a letter to Murray, "is generally good, -only by fits and starts, and you are lucky to get a sparkle here and there." Like the lyric poet, he concentrated his powers upon particular passages; like the lyric poet, his own emotion colored all he saw; and, like the lyric poet, his dearest theme was passion. When he describes nature, he always, if his genius is in its strength, bathes it in a transforming light, robes it in a grandeur not its own. Herein it is that his essential superiority to Scott, in regard of strict poetic power, is demonstrated. Scott is opulent in detail, and has nature's sweet changefulness, freshness, and variety. But in all the poetry of Scott, there is no such description as Byron's thunder-storm in the Alps. Besides that accurate realism, that broad, natural truth, which it might well have had from Scott, that description burns with a poetic personification such

as Scott could never have imparted. The live thunder leaps from crag to crag. The mountains have the hearts of men, and exult to each other in the commotion they produce. Scott describes a battle. We know precisely how the divisions were commanded, and when and where they charged. But where, in all the pages of Scott, do we find a line like this,

"Red Battle stamped his foot, and nations felt the shock ?”

And if the eye of Byron rolled in that fine lyric frenzy which spreads over nature the hues of human emotion and thought, no less was he a lyrist, and no less was he powerful in the delineation of passion. Since the days of Shakspeare, the burning heart of passion had not been so laid bare. The Corsairs, the Laras, the Gulnares, the Medoras of Byron, perfectly absurd as actual personages, are admirable mouthpieces of lyric emotion, of uncontrollable passion. Totally inadequate to body forth the spirit and tenor of a life, they represent with great effect the feelings of individual exceptional periods. There are such periods in life; volcanic epochs, brief but terrible, when sky and earth are mingled in wild fire-lit commotion, and the peaceful vineyards, ripening in the calm light of long summer days, as yet are not. The emotions of such times, in their burning intensity, in their ethereal tenderness, in the rapture of their joy and the agony of their sorrow, are depicted by Byron with surpassing power. It is when we consider the pure might of imagination. exhibited in the individual passages, of which, with a cement of versified prose, the larger poems of Byron have been truly declared by Macaulay to consist, and the marvellous truth and power with which human passion is everywhere depicted,—that we feel constrained to rank

Byron among the master intellects of mankind, and almost to agree with Goethe that his genius was incommensurable.

But not even in considering the excellence and enduring popularity of literary effort, is it permissible, if it is possible, to abstract any part of the whole life and character. The poetry of Byron is inseparably connected with his life and character. Through the latter there was a fatal flaw; and the former is pervaded by a moral taint, which, as the eye of humanity becomes purer and purer in the lapse of ages, will more and more endanger its literary immortality. The spectacle presented by Byron, in his life and death, is one of which the mysterious sadness may be called infinite. By all we can reverentially assume as to the intentions of the Almighty, and by all the analogy of nature and history, greatness of intellect ought to be one of the forces to keep the soul stable, to preserve a calmness and completeness in the life. So it seems radically to have been with the Platos and Ciceros, the Dantes and Luthers, the Miltons and Leibnitzes, the Pascals and Berkeleys of history. Diverse as the genius of such might be, its power tended to steady them, not to set them rocking like pillars shaken of earthquake. Never for a moment have such faltered in their deliberate assent and submission to the infinite rightness, beauty, and power of moral law. Not even in Swift's case do we find a strict parallel to the phenomenon, so tragically common in these days, of passion conquering genius, and quenching the heaven-soaring flame in its own foul ashes. Mirabeau, Burns, and Byron, to go no further, seem to me to present a spectacle new under the sun. These all had iron constitutions. Physically speaking, they were good for the whole of the threescore years and ten. Yet all three were laid in the dust in the prime of their years; and whatever the palliations we may admit, or the qualifi

cations we may make, it remains a simple fact that they were, in too literal a sense, their own murderers. No cowardly feebleness, no false humility, no "haunting admiration of the grandeur of disordered power," no accursed "hero-worship," ought to be permitted to stifle in us the still small voice which proclaims the awful magnitude of this sin. God and nature affirm the declaration of that still small voice; affirm it in the fevered frame, the burning brow, the early grave: and we are weak, blind, or rebellious, if we do not acknowledge the fact and learn the lesson.

An allusion to the moral taint which pervades the poetry of Byron brings us naturally to the poetry of Wordsworth; which forms the third great school of this opulent period. It is my profound conviction that it was rather to the moral elevation of his poetry, than to his intellectual or æsthetic capacities, that Wordsworth owed the fame and influence he acquired. As you yielded yourself to his guidance, you passed into a region removed alike from that in which the genius of Scott, and that in which the genius of Byron, loved to expatiate. You left behind that joyous land of faery, ringing with the voice of streams and birds, bright with flower and foam, in which you wandered with the border minstrel. You passed beyond the troubled atmosphere where the cloudy grandeurs of the Byronic poetry were unfolded. You stood on the mountain's brow. There at last was the still, unfathomable azure, seeming to look, with calm, eternal smile, on the wild glittering, far below, of the lightnings of passion. The mind of man, the crowning wonder of nature, is in no way more surprising than in its power of sympathy and response. It is easy to cast a spell over it. Any sort of syren chiming allures and subdues it. But its nobler sym