hard he must have labored, in conjunction with circumstances, to debase one of the finest spirits that ever uttered its musings in mortal language, but cannot redeem the work itself from the immutable law of the creation: That which is false and unnatural shall perish.' The very basis and entire conception of the work is a splendid falsehood,

'Which lies like truth, and yet most truly lies.'

For while I can easily conceive that a passionate spirit, cast into the seven-times heated furnace of its own fiery emotions, and subjected to the hardening process of experience, embittered by the world's unreasoning hostility, and stung to madness by its own voluntary degradation, might at last become a seared and passionless thing, insensible to the sympathies of country or of kindred, and moving in cold and lofty scorn through all that is grand or beautiful in Nature; it is, on the contrary, an incongruous, nay, an impossible conception; the conception of a being endowed, like the desolate wanderer, with an exquisite sense of the pathetic, and a perfect faculty of appreciating and embodying the lovely and the great, while his heart was separated, as by the gulf of the grave, from all fellow-feeling with the breathing multitudes of the world around him. True misanthropy cannot associate with that faculty which stirs the heart at will; and poetry is always, disguise it as you may, a yearning of the spirit toward the Good, the Beautiful, the Sublime. When, therefore, in the idle effort to conceal them, I see the bright links of human sympathy still glittering through the mist of bitterness, and connecting the Childe with his species by the chain of one common nature, I feel assured that his heart, though more intensely beating, was like all other hearts, and sheltered no scorn toward man, as man. He was merely a worn and weary worldling, disgusted with himself and offended with his country, seeking for excitement, which palled even in its madness; and, hoping to renew the cup of joy, quaffed too early and too fast, but which, had he known it, Virtue can keep always replenished to the brim from the perennial well-springs of our nature, and which Vice herself can never utterly exhaust. At the attempt to invest this shattered spirit at once with the stern cynicism of Timon and with the impassioned poetry of Burns, I may not, while viewing that magic workmanship of Genius, repeat the 'incredulus odi' of the Roman critic; but I say to myself, The conjuror of this wild creation was indeed a potent wizard, but he has evoked an incoherent and perishable world; a world green with no verdure of healthful vegetation, and brightened by no cheerful beams of sun or satellite; but umbraged by a growth of poisonous luxuriance, and livid with the baleful light of meteors, or lustrous with a fierce volcanic glare. The Childe Harold, then, with the exception of some immortal parts, untouched by the plague spots which must remain, embalmed in their own beauty, to the end of time, or at least till the extinction of our language, is a poem which, when contemporary sympathy with the self-inflicted tortures of its author, and the feverish interest awakened

by his brilliant waywardness, shall have subsided, must gradually become neglected and forgotten. Mournful fate! that so many glorious imaginings must fade away as the sun-beams vanish when the sun is set! But it is almost demonstrable from the very nature of the case.

For poetry, after religion, is the divinest gift of God to man. In truth, the finest elements of the one are drawn from the deepest principles of the other, and the essence of the two is largely iden tical. Twin-sisters of the same spiritual birth, and partners in the same eternal being, they traverse all the ranks of intellectual existence, and find a no less glad reception and natural dwelling-place in the unsophisticated spirit of man, than they find in the glowing heart of the tallest seraph that strikes his harp before the Almighty Throne. One in heaven, and one on earth, they walk hand in hand throughout the universe of GOD, and every where and always they link themselves to the Immense, and feed on the Immortal. Religion is never so attractive, nor so intrinsically lovely, as when interfused with genuine poetic feeling, and poetry is never so pure, nor so exalted, as when enlightened by the eye of faith and raised on the wings of devotion. No muse of mortal inspiration has ever swept from her harp-strings a music so sublime as that which trembled, instinct with holy passion, and swelled pregnant with unutterable meaning, from the ten-stringed instruments of Moses, David and Isaiah. Poetry, then, or the poetic faculty, is sent on a mission of benevolence and love, and its office is to purify, exalt, console. The chief and necessary elements of its being are faith in the living, universal presence of a superhuman agency, and an undoubting belief in the existence, and a reverent love for the manifestations of the Great, the Good, the Beautiful, the Holy. It embellishes and ennobles the dull realities of life, and, still unsated, fills our earth and the whole universe with fair ideal forms; reproductions of itself, embodiments of its own yearnings, that create the loveliness they seek. Its wish and tendency are to awaken a spirit of trustfulness, and call forth all the gentle charities of life, thus endearing our present abiding-place, by making it a garden of beauty and a nursery of immortal fruits. And in consonance with this character and this purpose, poets have usually been optimists, believing in the perfectibility and aiming to produce the ultimate perfection of our race. Therefore they are always bodying forth conceptions which carry physical, or mental, or moral excellence to the loftiest heights of the ideal. Therefore they have always imagined a golden age, existing anterior to historic records among the realms of Eld, and therefore, like all men, they dream of Fortunate Islands, an El Dorado, sleeping far away, serene and lovely, in the distant Future. He who sincerely believes in the stationary condition of society, or in the perishable nature of the soul, cannot be essentially a poet. The poet, so far from being isolated in character and feeling from the rest of his species, is an epitome of all their sympathies, and a channel for the utterance of their dearest and deepest emotions. Now the world, to repeat a stale truism, is a checkered

scene of joys and sorrows, and the nature of man a singular mixture of sadness and mirth. While the experience of suffering and our own frequent and conscious degradation impart to our spirits somewhat of a despondent, pensive and regretful tinge, yet the knowledge that we have still something great and excellent within us, the sweet remembrance of by-gone happiness, and the bright hopes that come bubbling upward from the very blackness of despair, do also diffuse over our hearts and faces the pleasant smiles of buoyancy, and confidence and love. Though sorrow may sometimes predominate over pleasure in experience, yet in anticipation we are rather trustful than disheartened, and even past afflictions are not unfrequently the source of after enjoyment.

'Hæc olim meminisse juvabit.'

The remembrance of the past, whether it be of pleasure or of pain, connected with the thought that that portion of our existence has gone by for ever, inspires a kind of melancholy which is agreeably fostered and soothed by tales of suffering and reflections of a sombre hue. But they must not be recitals of unmitigated sorrow, or thoughts of utter desolation. The most distressful tale may give pleasure to the heart, if it bear in itself a kind of antidote, a nepenthe, either in the administration of 'poetic justice,' or in the knowledge that conscious innocence is always happy, or in the belief of a sort of compensation to be received by the injured in another existence. And the most sombre treatise may gratify the mind, if through its texture be visible the sweet rays of Hope; a 'confident looking forward' to a better state of things in the infinite Hereafter, or a reference to some counterpoising gladness in our present condition. The burden of the poet's song, therefore, must not be one ceaseless chaunt about the hollowness, and falsehood, and cruelty of the world, though hollow, and false, and cruel enough it is, GoD knows; for there is likewise - GOD be thanked! on this earth of ours a large amount of nobleness, and kindness and truth. A picture which presents to us only the dark clouds and the chilling rain is a false picture; for where is the blue sky, and where the warm sunshine, which the LORD of Life has spread over and around us? A true genius, though he be the child of sorrow, can never become the idol of his race, if he weave all his words into querulous sarcasm and unvarying complaint. An exemplar of our nature and our life, he will mostly throw aside the reed, the wormwood, and the gall, and dipping his pen in love, will diffuse over his pages, despite himself, the mirthful sweetness of humanity. Nor will he disunite himself from his country and his kind, as by a wall of marble, nor rise above the sympathies of men, and seat himself on an iceberg, in an atmosphere of chill and cheerless elevation.

Now the spirit of Childe Harold, and of most of Byron's writings, is distrustful, repining and rebellious. Not even his towering genius could bear him above the petty querulousness of some other froward children of Nature; poor, fretful, narrow-spirited murmurers against the laws of GoD and man. It is true, his better feelings,

'the divinity that stirred within him,' sometimes broke through its envelopment of clouds, and the subdued and pensive music which then trembled from his harp-strings, is in unison with the pulse, and makes a responsive echo in the bosom of his kind. But the general tone of the work, at times fierce and bitterly sarcastic, at others despondent or utterly despairing, and almost always dissatisfied with the world, past, present and future, is not of a kind to produce permanent pleasure among men. Even those who believe not in the upward tendency of our race, and who despair that Nature will ever hum an evening lullaby to lay her weary and distempered children asleep upon her breast, can scarcely deem that this song of scornful bitterness and hopeless lamentation will be embalmed in the tears and coffined in the hearts of all posterity. For unhappiness is ever restless for change, and if all future generations are to be born beneath the influence of a weeping star, they will be likely to nourish or console their griefs in the perusal of some later and no less masterly Jeremiad. As for those beardless youths of the knitted brow, the curling lip, and the unfathomable eye; the great grandsons of that sentimental tribe, who strove to be as wretched as the wretched egotist, Rousseau; the 'blighted' stripplings, who labor to be pale and pensive, and throw out wild, broken hints that they have experienced that crushing agony which, in their preposterous creed, is the baptismal seal of genius; they will be ever ready to follow in the lead of some other fashionable sufferer, and to find a dainty sweetness' in his new and more modish form of 'lovely melancholy.' And those, in fine, who trust that the world is growing more virtuous, and, by consequence, more cheerful, will not expect these mournful psalms to be chaunted throughout coming ages, any more than the scorching wit and demon sneer of that 'architect of ruin,' the thousand-talented Voltaire, can command the admiration of time, when all mankind shall truly believe in God, and pay their rational and rightful homage to their Creator and their King. It may be proper that I should substantiate by a few references the justice of these strictures, though the work itself is throughout a proof of their correctness. Speaking of the fair sex, he says:

And again:

MAIDENS, like moths, are ever caught by glare,
And Mammon wins his way, where seraphs might despair.'

'FOR who would trust the seeming sighs

Of wife, or paramour?

Fresh feres will dry the bright, blue eyes

We late saw streaming o'er.'

Now, in the first place these bitter thrusts at the brightest flower left to man of his lost Eden, are in direct contradiction to many other passages of his writings; as for instance, this:

'ALAS! the love of women! it is known
To be a lovely and a fearful thing;
For all of theirs upon that die is thrown,
And if 't is lost, life hath no more to bring
To them but mockeries of the past alone,
And their revenge is as the tiger's spring,
Deadly, and quick, and crushing; yet as real
Torture is theirs what they inflict they feel.

'They're right; for man, to man so oft unjust,
Is always so to woman; one sole bond
Awaits them; treachery is all their trust;

Taught to conceal, their bursting hearts despond
Over their idol, till some wealthier lust

Buys them in marriage; and what rests beyond ?
A thankless husband, next a faithless lover,
Then dressing, nursing, praying, and all's over.'

As to the

'Look on this picture, and then on that,' my masters. inconsistency between them, it might be expected from one whose whole life and writings were the offspring of wild, unprincipled impulse, and who was at perfect liberty to say any thing that would strike. But is either of these frightful statements true, even in the worst parts of Europe, still more in the quiet homes of England, and more still in our own country? Not at all. We have, and we wish to have, no more conception of the prevalence of such a state of things than we have of the treachery, and hatred, and despair of Hell. Man is not always' nor generally unjust to woman, either here or elsewhere. Woman is not always caught by glare,' nor always as veering as the wind; nor, on the other hand, if her heart has been once misplaced, and her affections crushed, is she always or often left to a joyless, desolate old age. She has something else to live for. The social vices, unhappy and degrading, which attach so largely to the relations between man and woman; the frequent venality of the one heart, the treachery of the other, and the fickleness of both; still leave a vast preponderance of happiness arising from fond and faithful love; a happiness which almost all may win, and which none but a misanthrope can doubt, or a villain spoil. How much more truthful Milton's invocation to ' Wedded Love,' of which the following lines are a part; surely a thousand times the most exquisite in language and sentiment, of all that were ever written on the 'universal passion :'

'FAR be it that I should write thee sin or blame,
Or think thee unbefitting holiest place,
Perpetual fountain of domestic sweets,
Whose bed is undefiled and chaste pronounced,
Present, or past, as Saints and patriarchs used!
Here Love his golden shafts employs, here lights
His CONSTANT lamp, and waves his purple wings,
Reigns here and revels!'

Byron generally speaks of human life as if it were a lingering He sings with mournful energy of the passions and the tears of youth:

curse.

"THAT, ebbing, leave a sterile track behind,
O'er which all heavily the journeying years
Plod the last lands of life, where not a flower appears.'

Had he no conception of a virtuous old age? He, who has passed his youth and manhood, as every one may do, in the love of GoD and man, and in the observance of the laws of his being, finds not fruits alone, but flowers also, the richest and the rarest, smiling by his wintry pathway; ay, blossoming unchilled on the very edge of the grave. And he who, like Byron, lives in violation of his known and daily duties, will of course find that 'the springs of his life are poi