THE YOUNG MAY MOON. The young May moon is beaming, love, Through Morna's grove, When the drowsy world is dreaming, love! To lengthen our days 10 Is to steal a few hours from the night, my dear! 16 Is the eye from that casement peeping, love. Or, in watching the flight Of bodies of light, 20 He might happen to take thee for one, my dear. THE VALE OF CASHMERE. [From Lalla Rookh (1817): Introduction to 'The Light of the Haram'] With its roses the brightest that earth ever gave, As the love-lighted eyes that hang over their wave? Here the Magian his urn full of perfume is swinging, And here, at the altar, a zone of sweet bells Round the waist of some fair Indian dancer is ringing. 15 Or to see it by moonlight, The light o'er its palaces, gardens, and shrines; When the waterfalls gleam like a quick fall of stars, 20 From the cool, shining walks where the young people meet: 80 LORD BYRON. GEORGE GORDON BYRON (1788 1824), the son of a profligate Captain in the Guards and a hysterical Scotch heiress, was born in London. As the father died when his son was three years old, the boy grew up under the sole guidance of his petulant mother, who retired to Aberdeen. On the death of his grand-uncle, the fifth Baron Byron († 1798), he succeeded to the title and the ruinous family estate of Newstead Abbey, near Nottingham. After a five years' course at Harrow and an irregular residence at Trinity College, Cambridge, he went on a 'grand tour' to Spain, Malta, Turkey, and Greece (1809-1811), from which he brought home the first two cantos of his Childe Harold. The publication of these and other poems at once made the young lord the lion of the day, so that he could jot down in his journal, 'I awoke one morning and found myself famous.' In 1815 he married Miss Milbanke, who, however, left him after the birth of their daughter Ada (1816). From the general outcry, easily raised against a poet who had previously shocked respectability by his sceptical utterances, Byron withdrew to the Continent, leaving England in April 1816, never to return. Travelling through Belgium and the Rhine country he went to Geneva, where he spent much time in the company of Shelley, who first introduced him to the poetry of Wordsworth and probably also to that of Goethe. For the next three years (1817-1819) he settled at Venice, abandoning himself to a very dissolute life, till he met with the young Countess Teresa Guiccioli, the wife of an old Ravennese nobleman. He followed her and her family to Ravenna (1819), where he displayed great literary activity, and also to Pisa (1821), and ultimately removed to Genoa (1822). His zeal for liberty, which had aroused his sympathy for the Carbonari conspiracies in Italy, induced him to engage in the Greek war of independence and to leave Italy for Cephalonia in the summer of 1823. But, in the midst of military preparations, he was suddenly seized by a marsh-fever, and died three days later at Missolonghi. He was buried in the family vault at Hucknall Torkard, near Nottingham. While still an undergraduate, Byron published his first volume of poetry, entitled Hours of Idleness (1807), which was severely criticized in the 'Edinburgh Review'. But he pertly retorted in a vigorous literary satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), which, after the manner of Dryden and Pope, inveighed against most of the notable authors of the day. His rank as a master of poetry was at once established by the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in 1812, which give us a didacticdescriptive record of his travels in the Mediterranean and the Levant. In 1816 he added a third canto, containing his impressions of Belgium, the Rhine, and Switzerland, which exhibits the influence of Shelley in a higher note of description and a more metaphysical aspect of nature; and a fourth canto (1818), treating of his travels in Italy, introduced another new element, the feeling for art. A series of brilliant verse-tales on Eastern themes enjoyed with his contemporaries by far the greatest popularity of his works. All of these, with the exception of The Prisoner of Chillon (1816) and Maxeppa (1819), which were written during the bustle of his continental life , were swiftly poured forth in the intervals of London gaieties, The Giaur and The Bride of Abydos in 1813, The Corsair and its sequel Lara in 1814, The Siege of Corinth and Parisina in 1816. In Manfred (1817), which was for the greater part composed in Switzerland, but finished at Venice, he borrowed from Goethe's Faust the outward form of a witch-drama, in which his impressions of sublime Alpine scenery and pessimistic reflections on life are set forth in the beautiful songs of the spirits and the powerful monologues of Count Manfred, who, after murdering his beloved Astarte, in vain sought to ease his conscience in the mountain solitudes of the Alps. More lyrical than dramatic are also his two plays on biblical subjects, Cain (1821) and Heaven and Earth (1824), in the former of which the bold figure of Cain wonderfully embodies the spirit of revolt and denial, whilst his wife Adah represents the ideal of high-minded, selfdevoted womanhood. Fast adhering to the standards of the Augustan school, Byron also tried his hand at the regular drama in the French style; but his three historical tragedies, Marino Faliero (1820), Sardanapalus (1821), and The Two Foscari (1821), are wanting in dramatic skill, and probably were the least successful of his works. Universally recognised is Byron's extraordinary power as a satirist, which he early displayed in Beppo (1818), a clever skit on Venetian society, and which he fully developed in The Vision of Judgment (1822), a parody on Southey's apotheosis of George III., and in the vast fragment of Don Juan (16 cantos, 1819-1824), which is at once his greatest and his most characteristic work. Following Italian models in blending satire with description and narrative, Don Juan gives us an often bitter and cynical, but always sparkling and picturesque satire of social life in laying before us the history of a young Spanish nobleman and his adventures in Spain, Greece, Turkey, Russia, and England. Much of Byron's poetry is not free from technical defects, wanting in unity of construction and melody of versification. But his best poetry exhibits a sweeping strength and an intensity of passion which is hardly equalled by any other English poet. Besides all his life's work has been greatly operative as a powerful plea for individual freedom. More than in his native country Byron's genius has been acknowledged on the Continent, where he had a great influence on the Romantic movement in France (Musset) and Germany (Heine), as well as in Italy, Spain, and Russia. "Tis done ODE TO NAPOLEON BUONAPARTE. [1814] but yesterday a King! | Ill-minded man! why scourge thy kind Thanks for that lesson - it will teach 20 To after-warriors more Than high Philosophy can preach, And vainly preached before. That spell upon the minds of men 24 Breaks never to unite again, That led them to adore 28 The triumph, and the vanity, To thee the breath of life; 82 The sword, the sceptre, and that sway Which man seem'd made but to obey, Wherewith renown was rife All quell'd! Dark Spirit! what must be Or dread of death alone? 44 To die a prince or live a slave Thy choice is most ignobly braye! He who of old would rend the oak, Dreamed not of the rebound; 48 Chained by the trunk he vainly broke 52 مالات 56 Alone how looked he round? Thou in the sternness of thy strength An equal deed hast done at length, And darker fate hast found: He fell, the forest-prowlers' prey; But thou must eat thy heart away! The Roman, when his burning heart Was slaked with blood of Rome, Threw down the dagger dared depart, In savage grandeur, home. He dared depart in utter scorn 60 Of men that such a yoke had borne, Yet left him such a doom! His only glory was that hour Of self-upheld abandon'd power. To think that God's fair world hath been 80 And Earth hath spilt her blood for him, And thanked him for a throne! In humblest guise have shown. If thou hadst died as Honour dies, Some new Napoleon might arise, To shame the world again But who would soar the solar height, To set in such a starless night? 84 88 92 96 Weigh'd in the balance, hero dust 100 To all that pass away; |