charm peculiar to itself, cannot be denied. A young French renegado confessed to Chateaubriand, that he never found himself alone, galloping in the desert, without a sensation approaching to rapture which was indescribable. 18.-Page 83, line 15. The Dove of peace and promise to mine ark! [The longest, as well as most splendid, of those passages, with which the perusal of his own strains, during revision, inspired him, was that rich flow of eloquent feeling which follows the couplet,-"Thou, my Zuleika, share and bless my bark," &c.-a strain of poetry, which, for energy and tenderness of thought, for music of versification, and selectness of diction, has, throughout the greater portion of it, but few rivals in either ancient or modern song.-MOORE.] Lord Byron bid Mr. Murray choose between "fancied" and "airy; but later he substituted the felicitous epithet which stands in the text. At the same time he sent two other versions, that Gifford might select that which was "best, or rather not worst-" "And {gilds the hope of morning with its ray.' tints 'And gilds to-morrow's hope with heavenly ray."] 20.-Page 83, line 27. Blooming as Aden in its earliest hour. "Jannat al Aden," the perpetual abode, the Mussulman paradise. 21.- Page 84, line 4. He makes a solitude, and calls it-peace! [Lord Byron states that he derived this line from a sentence of Tacitus.] 22.-Page 84, line 29. The deepest murmur of this lip shall be, ["Then if my lip once murmurs, it must be."--MS. This passage was intended by Lord Byron for an imitation of Medea's speech in the seventh book of Ovid's Metamorphoses: "My love possest, in Jason's bosom laid, SANDYS' transl.] 23.-Page 88, line 18. Then levell'd with the wave [The incident here depicted was witnessed by Lord Byron near the Dardanelles. The body of a man, who had been executed, rose and fell with the waves, and several sea-fowl that approached to devour it were scared away by the movement of the arms.] 24.-Page 88, line 26. And mourn'd above his turban-stone, A turban is carved in stone above the graves of men only. 25.-Page 88, line 35. The loud Wul-wulleh warn his distant ear? The death-song of the Turkish women. The "silent slaves" are the men, whose notions of decorum forbid complaint in public. 26.--Page 89, line 28. "Where is my child? "-an Echo answers-" Where?" "I came to the place of my birth, and cried, "The friends of my youth, where are they?' and an Echo answered, 'Where are they?'"-From an Arabic MŠ. The above quotation (from which the idea in the text is taken) must be already familiar to every reader: it is given in the first annotation, p. 67, of "The Pleasures of Memory;" a poem so well known as to render a reference almost superfluous; but to whose pages all will be delighted to recur. 27.-Page 90, line 33. Will shape and syllable its sound "And airy tongues that syllable men's names."-MILTON. For a belief that the souls of the dead inhabit the form of birds, we need not travel to the East. Lord Lyttleton's ghost story, the belief of the Duchess of Kendal, that George I. flew into her window in the shape of a raven (see" Orford's Reminiscences"), and many other instances, bring this superstition nearer home. The most singular was the whim of a Worcester lady, who, believing her daughter to exist in the shape of a singing bird, literally furnished her pew in the cathedral with cages full of the kind; and as she was rich, and a benefactress in beautifying the church, no objection was made to her harm ess folly. For this anecdote, see "Orford's Letters." THE CORSAIR:1 A TALE. "I suoi pensieri in lui dormir non ponno." TASSO, Gerusalemme Liberata, canto x. INTRODUCTION TO THE CORSAIR. "THE CORSAIR" was completed on the 31st of December, 1813, having been composed in ten days, at the rate of 200 lines a day. When the wonderful merit of the Tale is considered, the feat is without a parallel in the history of poetry. The only additions to the original draught were the fifth, seventeenth, and twenty-third sections of Canto III. Medora was a portrait of an acquaintance, and is called Francesca in the manuscript. Lord Byron had tried the heroic couplet in one of the paragraphs of " The Bride of Abydos," and the admiration lavished upon it, may have induced him to adopt that measure in "The Corsair." Though no metre was so hackneyed, it assumed in his hands a distinctive character. There are lines which recall his deep study of Pope, but, with much of Pope's terseness, there is far greater freedom; and, with less negligence than Dryden, there is even more than Dryden's ease and spirit. The stream of the narrative bounds along in a rapid and sparkling current; and, notwithstanding the fetters of a monotonous metre, and the exigencies of rhyme, all the varieties of incident and emotion, assume their natural and ever-changing expression. Without one feeble passage-and hardly a feeble couplet-there are gems which shine conspicuous amid the general blaze. Myriads of partings have been painted in poetry, but the parting of Conrad and Medora is the masterpiece of them all. Nor can anything be truer to nature than the instant exchange of feminine tenderness for martial enthusiasm in the Pirate's breast, when nearing the vessel he sees his flag, and hears the animating hum of preparation. The unrivalled scene in which the Corsair throws off his disguise, is needless to be specified, and from the second visit of Gulnare to his cell, up to her final dismissal, is one glorious flow of passionate verse. Lord Byron has informed us that the tale "was written con amore, and much from existence." A few days later, and he makes in his journal this singular entry: "Hobhouse told me an odd report,that I am the actual Conrad, the veritable Corsair, and that part of my travels are supposed to have passed in piracy. Um!-people sometimes hit near the truth, but never the whole truth. H. don't know what I was about the year after he left the Levant; nor does any one-nornor-nor-however, it is a lie-but 'I doubt the equivocation of the fiend that lies like truth!" He mentioned the report to a female acquaintance, who replied, "I don't wonder, Conrad is so like," upon which he remarks that if she knew nothing, no one else could. Whatever may be the meaning of these dark allusions, the figure, the features, and the spare diet of Conrad, had their counterpart in Lord Byron; and in his supercilious smile, in his haughty and melancholy mien, in his low opinion of mankind, and in his self-reproachful and uneasy soul, "that man of loneliness and mystery was the poet in his sombre and unbending moods. The success of the poem was immense. Sir James Mackintosh mentioned, as a proof of Lord Byron being the author of the time, that 6,000 copies of "The Bride of Abydos" were sold within a month, but of "The Corsair" 14,000 were sold in a day. Lord Byron presented the copyright to Mr. Dallas, who disposed of it for 500 guineas. ΤΟ THOMAS MOORE, ESQ. MY DEAR MOORE, I DEDICATE to you the last production with which I shall trespass on public patience, and your indulgence, for some years; and I own that I feel anxious to avail myself of this latest and only opportunity of adorning my pages with a name, consecrated by unshaken public principle, and the most undoubted and various talents. While Ireland ranks you among the firmest of her patriots; while you stand alone the first of her bards in her estimation, and Britain repeats and ratifies the decree, permit one, whose only regret, since our first acquaintance, has been the years he had lost before it commenced, to add the humble but sincere suffrage of friendship, to the voice of more than one nation. It will at least prove to you, that I have neither forgotten the gratification derived from your society, nor abandoned the prospect of its renewal, whenever your leisure or inclination allows you to atone to your friends for too long an absence. It is said among those friends, I trust truly, that you are engaged in the composition of a poem whose scene will be laid in the East; none can do those scenes so much justice. The |