was the spoiled child of society. During this period he added to his fame by publishing "The Giaour," "The Bride of Abydos," "The Corsair," "The Siege of Corinth," "Lara," and "Parisina," which are all vigorous Oriental romances, full of love, crime, and adventure. They were all written hastily, all won instant popularity, and all contain gleams of real poetry. For instance:

66

Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle
Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime?
Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle,
Now melt into sorrow, now madden to crime!

Know ye the land of the cedar and vine,

The Giaour.

Where the flowers ever blossom, the beams ever shine;
Where the light wings of Zephyr, oppressed with perfume,
Wax faint o'er the gardens of Gul (rose) in her bloom;
Where the citron and olive are fairest of fruit,
And the voice of the nightingale never is mute;

Where the tints of the earth and the hues of the sky,
In color though varied in beauty may vie,

And the purple of ocean is deepest in dye;

Where the virgins are soft as the roses they twine,
And all, save the spirit of man, is divine?

'Tis the clime of the East! 'Tis the land of the Sun!
Can he smile on such deeds as his children have done?
O wild as the accents of lovers' farewell

Are the hearts which they bear and the tales which they tell."

Ibid.

The Bride of Abydos.

During this period he also wrote The Waltz a savage attack on that dance, then newly imported from Germany; an Ode to Napoleon," who had just fallen: and Hebrew Melodies." The "Ode " contains a tribute to Washington, whom Byron calls the Cincinnatus of the West. Among the Melodies" are several still familiar pieces, "She Walks in Beauty," "The Harp the Monarch Minstrel Swept.” "The Wild Gazelle on Judah's Hills." "Oh! Snatched Away in Beauty's Bloom," and " The Assyrian came down like a Wolf on the Fold." As a result of his poetry, he met the Prince Regent, narrowly escaped being appointed poet-laureate, and became fast friends with Walter Scott. As a result of his poetry plus his peerage and his beauty, he was besieged by women. To escape them he married Miss Milbanke January 2, 1815. She endured his society just a year, when she left him for reasons which the world does not yet know. He was accused of every possible and impossible vice, being compared to Sardanapalus, Nero, Tiberius, the Duke of Orleans, Heliogabalus, and Satan. Feeling that, if what was said of him was true, he was unfit for England, if false England was unfit for him, he left it forever.

He journeyed by way of Brussels and the Rhine to Switzerland. Here, in the congenial company of Percy Bysshe Shelley, he sought in fresh poetic enterprises to forget his troubles. Among other things he wrote in Switzerland the " Prisoner of Chillon " and the third canto of " Childe Harold." Finally he crossed the Alps, and settled November, 1816, in Italy, where he lived until 1824. During these eight years he completed the fourth and last canto of "Childe Harold "; wrote three more narrative poems, "Beppo," Mazeppa," and the "Island"; produced a series of misanthropic and undramatic tragedies, of which" Cain " is the best artistically and the worst morally; wrote "Darkness," the most terrible, and "The Vision of Judgment," the funniest of his poems; and put together " Don Juan," a narrative poem in sixteen cantos, which is richer in humor and more accurate in description than any of his other works.

The third and fourth cantos of "Childe Harold," which appeared 1818, revealed Byron's real power. In the third he takes his readers to Brussels; and paints a picture of the ball given by the Duke of Wellington the night before the battle of Waterloo. There was a

sound of revelry by night. Music arose with its voluptuous swell. Soft eyes looked love to eyes which spake again and all went merry as a marriage bell until the cannon's opening roar. Even then the ball continued.

"On with the dance! let joy be unconfined;

No sleep till morn, when youth and pleasure meet
To chase the glowing hours with flying feet."

The hurrying to and fro, the sudden partings, the awful morn after night so sweet, the mounting in hot haste, and then the battle, are depicted in words that live and will live for ages. Napoleon's fate causes Byron to exclaim:

'He who ascends to mountain-tops shall find

The loftiest peaks most wrapt in clouds and snow.
He who surpasses or subdues mankind

Must look down on the hate of those below."

He then journeys up the Rhine, to which he pays eloquent tribute; comes to the Alps, the palaces of Nature; and rests by the blue rushing of the arrowy Rhone. The fourth canto is devoted to Italy. It begins,

"I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs,"

and goes on with tributes to Tasso; Dante; Ariosto, the southern Scott; Tully, Rome's least mortal mind; the starry Galileo and his woes; and Rome itself.

"O Rome! my country! city of the soul!"

"The Niobe of nations! there she stands,

Childless and crownless, in her voiceless woe."

"The Goth, the Christian, Time, War, Flood, and Fire,
Have dealt upon the seven-hilled city's pride."

66

'Alas the lofty city, and alas

The trebly hundred triumphs, and the day
When Brutus made the dagger's edge surpass
The conqueror's sword in bearing fame away!
Alas for Tully's voice, and Virgil's lay,
And Livy's pictured page.

"Tully was not so eloquent as thou,

Thou nameless column with the buried base."

He goes on to describe the gladiator, butchered to make a Roman holiday; the Coliseum; the Pantheon; the Laocoön; and the Apollo Belvedere. Sick of the ruin he has beheld, he cries:

"Oh that the desert were my dwelling place,
With one fair spirit for my minister."

"There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes

By the deep sea and music in its roar.
I love not man the less but nature more."

"Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin; his control
Stops with the shore."

"Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee-
Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?"

"Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow."

In "Beppo" and "Don Juan" Byron abandoned the somewhat grandiloquent style of his earlier poems and along with it some of their gloom. They are written in what is called ottava rima, the stanzas being constructed thus:

"I love the language, that soft broken Latin,

Which melts like kisses from a female mouth,
And sounds as if it should be writ on satin,

With syllables that breathe of the warm South,

And gentle liquids gliding all so pat in

That not a single accent seems uncouth,

Like our harsh northern whistling grunting guttural,
Which we're obliged to hiss and spit and sputter all."

This lends itself well both to serious description and to biting wit.
For example:

"For most men (till by losing rendered sager)
Will back their own opinions by a wager."

Beppo. Stanza 27.

"But, oh ye lords of ladies intellectual,
Inform us truly-have they not henpecked you all."

Don Juan. Canto I. Stanza 22.

""Tis sweet to hear the watch-dog's honest bark
Bay deep-mouthed welcome as we draw near home;
'Tis sweet to know there is an eye will mark
Our coming and look brighter when we come.”

Ibid. Canto I. Stanza 123.

"He was the mildest-mannered man

That ever scuttled ship or cut a throat."

Ibid. Canto III. Stanza 41.

"But words are things and a small drop of ink,
Falling like dew upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think."
Don Juan. Canto III. Stanza 88.

"There's not a sea the passenger e'er pukes in
Throws up more dangerous breakers than the Euxine."
Ibid. Canto V. Stanza 5.

"That all-softening, overpowering knell,
The tocsin of the soul-the dinner bell."

Ibid. Canto V. Stanza 49.

"The drying up a single tear has more
Of honest fame than shedding seas of gore."

Ibid. Canto VIII. Stanza 3.

"Thrice happy he whose name has been well spelt
In the despatch: I knew a man whose loss
Was printed Grove, although his name was Grose."

Ibid. Stanza 18.

Amid these poetical labors and the pleasures of Italian society, Byron grew prematurely old. Tired of Italy, tired of fame, and tired of life, he thought for a while of going to the United States. While he was yet undecided on this point, Greece rose in rebellion against the Turks. He had always loved the oppressed race and recently in "Don Juan" had included some of the finest of his verses in an attempt to rouse them.

"The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece,

Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
Where Delos rose and Phoebus sprung.
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all, except their sun, is set.

"The mountains look on Marathon,
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone

66

I dreamed that Greece might yet be free.

Earth! render back from out thy breast
A remnant of our Spartan dead!

Of the three hundred, grant but three
To make a new Thermopylæ.

"You have the Pyrrhic dance as yet;
Where is the Pyrrhic phalanx gone?
Of two such lessons, why forget

The nobler and the manlier one?
You have the letters Cadmus gave;
Think ye he meant them for a slave?"