and may be used for evil; but genius in itself is good, and must be ever lovely. Whoever has it, cannot be wholly in the dark; a light there must be in him; and though the light be broken, it is light from heaven. Genius in itself is good; and in any form of manifestation, good must be its leading attribute. For in what is the manifestation of genius? In truth, in beauty, in grandeur. Genius cannot be divorced from reason and from order. If reason and order must therefore pervade all lasting works of genius, wickedness, of which the principles are falsehood and confusion, can never be their dominant constituents. Fine productions may be connected with moral deformity, but that is not their substance; it is not that which fires our admiration ; it is not that which genius animates. And as in the production, so in the author. His genius dignifies his person, and to his genius, and not his crimes, we pay our reverence. But his genius is an essential of his nature; it is associated as such, with our idea of him, and we cannot divest that idea of the attractions which it thus derives. We cannot think of the man of genius, as if he had only sins; for, strive as we may, we must include the nobler parts of his nature in our conception, and these nobler parts will mostly stamp their own likeness on the totality; we cannot cut the man in two, and execrate this part while we adore that. Lord

Byron, especially, will defy such an operation, for his genius is not impersonal; it melted into his entire existence; it was entwined with every fibre of his individuality; and it would be as easy to tear from his heart the whole net-work of veins and arteries, and expect it still to beat, as to dissect with critical scalpel his actual being from his poetical, and leave either of them vitality. The one is the palpitation of the other; every movement of sound has its pulse. His poetry is the chronicle of his soul; and whether from confidence or contempt, he lays it bare to our view, and with a reckless independence, leaves himself to our opinion. If our opinion must be severe, we should not, in forming it, forget that he has deprecated nothing by concealment, and that caution might easily have secured him a better name, though it would not have made him a better man.

THE MORAL SPIRIT

OF

BYRON'S GENIUS.

THE main characteristics of Byron's genius, it needs no profound sagacity to discern; they are obvious on the face of his compositions; they are strength of passion and strength of will; coördinated by a keen intellect, aided by a memory, not of ponderous learning, but of instinctive facility, enlivened by a fancy of exhaustless association; these attributes give to Byron his peculiarity and his power. This strength of passion and strength of will are embodied in all his impersonations. Pilgrims or corsairs, brigands or bravoes, outcasts or apostates, whatever be their outward costume or their outward lot, they are all thus distinguished. A certain intensity of consciousness or intensity of action is the law of their poetical existence. A life within there must be, of concentrated feeling or con

centrated purpose; a life without there must be, of daring or ambition, of danger which knows but death or triumph. And they must be independent as well as intense; impregnable of soul in right or wrong; in all fortunes masters of their own fate; in defeat they must ask no question; in adversity no pity; in suffering they must make no moan; if their hopes are struck, these hopes must die without complaint, and find a silent burial in the broken heart. The beings that Byron conceived in fiction, and those with whom he sympathized in history, are beings of turbulent, but of isolated souls; beings that struggle and that suffer, but that cannot be subdued; beings with whom life must cease to be a desire, when it ceases to be a tumult. To such purpose is the impassioned confession of the Giaour:

"My days though few, have passed below

In much of joy, but more of woe,

Yet still in hours of love or strife

I've 'scaped the weariness of life;

Now leagued with friends, now girt with foes.
I loathed the languor of repose;
Now nothing left to love or hate;
No more with hope or pride elate,
I'd rather be the thing that crawls
Most noxious o'er a dungeon's walls,

Than pass my dull unvarying days
Condemned to meditate and gaze.

Yet wakes a wish within my breast
For rest-but not to feel-'t is rest.”

This force of inward life connected with a most happy aptitude of utterance, renders Byron a supreme master of language and description. Of all English poets, he is properly the most eloquent. Diction and thought with Byron are not, as the garment and the body, but as the body and the soul, mutually intermingled and coëxistent, melting each into each, and thus blended, forming an inseparable and a living totality. Words answered to will, and every word was the conductor of an impulse or the mirror of a thought. By his wonderful command over language, Byron combines passion and description in a manner which, if all other claims failed, would entitle him to the praise of a special originality. Creation, in his descriptive passages, seems articulate. The elements seem fraught with human consciousness; and human consciousness seems to assume the might of the elements. The tempest lashes ocean with the resentment of man's anger; and man rushes against his fellow with the fury of the deep. Nor is Byron less powerful in the expression of passion simply. Scorn, hate, contempt, derision, come in a boiling torrent from his heated breast, with a vehemence