And saw around me the wide field revive
With fruits and fertile promise, and the Spring

Come forth her work of gladness to contrive,
With all her reckless birds upon the wing,

I turned from all she brought to those she could not bring.

The note to these stanzas is curious; the noble poet was a connoisseur in battle plains, and, as he was not too fond of praising any thing modern, his opinion of Waterloo must have been sincere.

My guide from Mont St. Jean over the field seemed intelligent and accurate. The place where Major Howard fell was not far from two tall and solitary trees (there was a third cut down, or shivered in the battle) which stand a few yards from each other at a pathway's side.-Beneath these he died and was buried. The body has since been removed to England. A small hollow for the present marks where it lay, but will probably soon be effaced; the plough has been upon it, and the grain is.

'After pointing out the different spots where Picton and other gallant men had perished, the guide said, "Here Major Howard lay; I was near him when wounded." I told him my relationship, and he seemed then still more anxious to point out the particular spot and circumstances. The place is one of the most marked in the field, from the peculiarity of the two trees above-mentioned.

'I went on horseback twice over the field, comparing it with my recollection of similar scenes. As a plain, Waterloo seems marked out for the scene of some great action-though this may be mere imagination: I have viewed with attention those of Platea, Troy, Mautinea, Leuctra, Chæronea, and Marathon; and the field around Mont St. Jean and Hougoumont appears to want little but a better cause, and that undefinable but impressive halo which the lapse of ages throws around a celebrated spot, to vie in interest with any or all of these, except perhaps the last mentioned.'

There is no part of the poem which gives us more real satisfaction, or is more congenial to the interest which we feel for Lord Byron's character, than this, in which he does himself great honour by handsomely seizing the opportunity of making amends for the rough manuer in which he had formerly handled the Earl of Carlisle. His resentment against that nobleman was of a purely personal nature; and, if his noble kinsman and guardian had only written bad poetry, he would probably have remained to this day unwhipped by Lord Byron's satirical lash. The

first cause of quarrel was that Lord Carlisle either disparaged, or praised too coldly, some of his ward's youthful poetry; but the dissatisfaction which this occasioned was much increased by the unkindness with which the elder nobleman declined to present Lord Byron on his taking his seat in the House of Lords. It required no small effort from a man of Lord Byron's temper, after the opinion he had formed and expressed of Lord Carlisle, to seem to request his countenance and assistance on such an occasion. Lord Byron did, however, make that effort; he wrote to his relation, reminding him that he should have attained his majority at the commencement of the ensuing session of Parliament; and he expected, as one should think naturally enough, that Lord Carlisle would on this have offered to present him. Such a proceeding would have been at once sensible and dignified, and would have proved that, with a proper sense of his own consequence, his lordship had at least enough wisdom and good temper to overlook the boyish failings of one who had many undoubted claims to his protection. Lord Carlisle, however, thought otherwise, and, in reply to Lord Byron's letter, merely pointed out to him the forms commonly observed by Peers upon their taking seats in the House of Lords. This it was, much more than any previous offences, and still more than his bad poetry, that drew upon Lord Carlisle the fierce attack of an enemy whom he too much despised. The circumstances under which he was thus compelled to take his seat in the House were highly painful to Lord Byron. Having been refused in a quarter where he did not expect it (for, in point of fact, Lord Carlisle, by not offering to present him, did refuse), Lord Byron did not choose to apply to any other person to do that for him which many among his noble acquaintance would most willingly have done. He resolved to go without any introduction, and he put this resolution into practice. We have heard, from the narration of an eye-witness, that Lord Byron went through the whole affair as if he was performing a very unwilling sacrifice.

When he entered the House he looked paler than usual; and, although he was much mortified, his features wore a look which seemed say that there had never been a prouder spirit within those old walls.

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very few Peers were present, for it was quite early in the afternoon. Lord Byron passed by the woolsack without stopping to speak to the Lord-Chancellor, who was occupied in the dispatch of some of the routine business of the House, and went straight to the table, where the oaths were administered to him by the proper officer. When this ceremony was concluded the Lord-Chancellor approached him, and,

with that good-tempered manner which he possesses, congratulated him upon his accession to his place in that House. Lord Byron looked all this time stiff, cold, and even displeased. Lord Eldon put out his hand frankly and warmly; Lord Byron requited his courtesy by merely putting the ends of his fingers into it. The Chancellor went back to the woolsack; and Lord Byron, after lounging for a few minutes on one of the opposition benches, quitted the House. One of the men in whom his talents and virtues had excited a high and disinterested affection, and who witnessed this odd scene with considerable pain, remonstrated with him upon the coolness with which he received the Lord-Chancellor's compliments. Lord Byron said, if he had done otherwise, it would have been thought he meant to join the court party; but that he had resolved to have nothing to do with any of the parties then existing in England. He added, that he should now go abroad; and a very short time elapsed before he put this intention into practice.

Probably Lord Carlisle has regretted that he thought fit to act with so much coldness, upon this occasion, to so near a relative: it is to be hoped that he has; and, without meaning to imply any harsh reflection upon that nobleman, we are justified in adding that it is not the only occasion upon which Lord Byron's conduct has appeared improper for want of kind and careful advisers. In the third canto of Childe Harold,' from which this anecdote of Lord Byron's life has induced us to digress-we trust not unpleasingly to our reader-his lordship proved that he had forgiven the unkindness he had experienced; and to that poem we now recur.

The other stanzas, alluding to the grief of those who lost husbands, lovers, parents, children-all that were dearest to their hearts-in the slaughter at Waterloo, are highly beautiful and affecting. Still alluding to Major Howard, he says:

I turned to thee, to thousands, of whom each,
And one as all, a ghastly gap did make
In his own kind and kindred, whom to teach
Forgetfulness were mercy for their sake.

The Archangel's trump, not Glory's, must awake
Those whom they thirst for though the sound of Fame
May for a moment sooth, it cannot slake

The fever of vain longing; and the name
So honoured but assumes a stronger, bitterer, claim.

They mourn, but smile at length; and, smiling, mourn :
The tree will wither long before it fall;

The hull drives on, though mast and sail be torn ;
The roof-tree sinks, but moulders on the hall
In massy hoariness; the ruined wall
Stands when its wind-worn battlements are gone;

The bars survive the captive they inthrall;
The day drags through though storms keep out the sun ;
And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on:

Even as a broken mirror, which the glass

In every fragment multiplies, and makes

A thousand images of one that was,

The same, and still the more, the more it breaks;
And thus the heart will do, which not forsakes,
Living in shattered guise, and still, and cold,

And bloodless, with its sleepless sorrow aches,
Yet withers on till all without is old,

Showing no visible sign, for such things are untold.

The apostrophe to Buonaparte is touching and true, and the recollection that the poet and the hero have since abided the common lot of mortality adds to the impression which the verses must necessarily make upon every reader:

There sunk the greatest, nor the worst, of men,

Whose spirit, antithetically mixt,

One moment of the mightiest, and again

On little objects with like firmness fixt,
Extreme in all things! hadst thou been betwixt,
Thy throne had still been thine, or never been;
For daring made thy rise as fall: thou scek'st
Even now to reassume the imperial mien,

And shake again the world, the Thunderer of the scene!
Conqueror and captive of the Earth art thou!

She trembles at thee still, and thy wild name
Was ne'er more bruited in men's minds than now
That thou art nothing, save the jest of Fame,
Who wooed thee once, thy vassal, and became
The flatterer of thy fierceness, till thou wert
A god unto thyself; nor less the same

To the astounded kingdoms all inert,

Who deemed thee for a time whate'er thou didst assert.

Oh, more or less than man-in high or low,

Battling with nations, flying from the field;
Now making monarchs' necks thy footstool, now
More than thy meanest soldier taught to yield;
An empire thou couldst crush, command, rebuild,
But govern not thy pettiest passion, nor,

However deeply in men's spirits skilled,

Look through thine own, nor curb the lust of war,
Nor learn that tempted Fate will leave the loftiest star.
Yet well thy soul hath brooked the turning tide
With that untaught innate philosophy,

Which, be it wisdom, coldness, or deep pride,

Is gall and wormwood to an enemy.

When the whole host of hatred stood hard by,
To watch and mock thee shrinking, thou hast smiled
With a sedate and all-enduring eye;-

When Fortune fled her spoiled and favorite child,
He stood unbowed beneath the ills upon him piled.

The following stanzas might have been applied perhaps as forcibly to Lord Byron as to the dethroned emperor:

But quiet to quick bosoms is a hell,

And there hath been thy bane; there is a fire
And motion of the soul which will not dwell
In its own narrow being, but aspire
Beyond the fitting medium of desire;
And, but once kindled, quenchless evermore,

Preys upon high adventure, nor can tire
Of aught but rest; a fever at the core,
Fatal to him who bears, to all who ever bore.

This makes the madmen who have made men mad

By their contagion; conquerors and kings,

Founders of sects and systems, to whom add

Sophists, bards, statesmen, all unquiet things
Which stir too strongly the soul's secret springs,
And are themselves the fools to those they fool;
Envied, yet how unenviable! what stings