which open a canto of the first of his long poems, The Lay of the Last Minstrel.

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

"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 echo 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 idly 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 o'erlive such woes, Enchantress! is thine own.
"Hark! as my lingering foosteps slow retire,
Some Spirit of the Air has waked thy string!
'T is now a seraph bold, with touch of fire,
'T is 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 't is silent all!. Enchantress, fare thee well!"

1788-1824

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 nobleman of nineteen, was reviewed in one of the magazines with terrible criticism. The Edinburgh Review, the same which had so lashed the poets of the Lake School with its criticism, now attacked this budding poet. It is true that the Hours of Idleness was not a collection of masterpieces of poetry, but there was enough

of the promise of that genius which Byron showed afterwards to make us feel indignant that the critics 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 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 classic school of Pope, whom Byron fancied that he thought the greatest poet. In spite of this, Byron belonged by temper and genius to the new school of poetry, and was much more revolutionary in temper than any of the moderns.

In all he has written one sees that 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 of any of the others whom Byron praised so highly.

After his tilt with the bards and reviewers he travelled on the Continent, and there wrote the first and second cantos of Childe Harold. When he went to see his London publisher, on his return, 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 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, - 't is 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 concentred 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.

"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; 't would disarm The spectre Death, had he substantial power to harm.

"The sky is changed; and such a change! O 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 knoll

Of what in me is sleepless, if I rest.

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

Are ye like those within the human breast?

Or do ye find at length, like eagles, some high nest?

"Could I embody and unbosom now

That which is most within me; could I wreak
My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw

Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak,

All that I would have sought, and all I seek,
Bear, know, feel, and yet breathe, into one word,
And that one word were Lightning, I would speak;

But as it is, I live and die unheard,

With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword.

"The morn is up again, the dewy morn,

With breath all incense, and with cheek all bloom, Laughing the clouds away with playful scorn,

And living as if earth contained no tomb,

And, glowing into day; we may resume

The march of our existence; and thus I,

Still on thy shores, fair Leman! may find room

And food for meditation, nor pass by

Much that may give us pause, if pondered fittingly."

This magnificent handling of Nature, this description of the breathless lull before the storm, the burst of the clouds on Jura's head, the passionate invocation to lake, river, and mountain, all these, beside the poetry of the eighteenth century, were like a real thunder-storm beside a storm in a theatre.

Before Byron finished Childe Harold, he wrote a number of stories in verse, The Corsair, Lara, The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos. These stories, nearly all with a hero who lived in revolt against law and order, were accepted as pictures of the poet's own stormy nature. Already, in respectable English circles, there was much horror felt at this strange, original spirit, so lawless and reckless; and he made foes as well as friends by his poetry.

Going back to Italy a second time, Byron finished Childe Harold, and in his later years wrote several dramatic works. Werner, Sardanapalus, Cain, The Deformed Transformed, are among the best of these. These were dramatic in form, but not dramas in the sense of works fit for the action of the stage.

Byron's shorter or lyric poems do not match the longer ones in merit. His wings had a wide sweep, and he wanted plenty of room for his flights. The lyric poem was not his forte. His best short poems are to be found among some songs he wrote to Hebrew melodies. Here is one of the most familiar, a grand piece of word melody:

THE DESTRUCTION OF SENNACHERIB.

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Like the leaves of the forest when summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen;
Like the leaves of the forest when autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;