'high in the esteem and confidence of his country, who had the ' remembrance of his past exploits, the motives of present reputa'tion and future glory to prop his integrity, had no charms for three simple peasants, leaning only on their virtue, and a sense of 'duty.

While Arnold is handed down with execration to future times, posterity will repeat with reverence the names of Vanwart, Pauld'ing, and Williams.'

To those, if any there be, who still retain a doubt of their honourable motives, we earnestly recommend a careful perusal of the two productions which we have thus noticed.

ART. IV.-Manfred. A Dramatic Poem. By Lord Byron. 8vo. Murray, London, 1817. Republished by Van Winkle & Wiley, New-York, & M. Thomas, Philadelphia. From the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine.

LORD BYRON has been elected by acclamation to the throne of poetical supremacy, nor are we disposed to question his title to the crown. There breathes over all his genius an air of kingly dignity; strength, vigour, energy, are his attributes; and he wields his faculties with a proud consciousness of their power, and a confident anticipation of their effect. Living poets perhaps there are, who have taken a wider range, but none who have achieved such complete, such perfect, triumphs. In no great attempt has he ever failed; and, soon as he begins his flight, we feel that he is to soar upon unflagging wings,-that when he has reached the black and tempestuous elevation of his favourite atmosphere, he will, eaglelike, sail on undisturbed through the heart of clouds, storms, and darkness.

To no poet was there ever given so awful a revelation of the passions of the human soul. He surveys, with a stern delight, that tumult and conflict of terrible thoughts from which other highlygifted and powerful minds have involuntarily recoiled; he calmly and fearlessly stands upon the brink of that abyss from which the soul would seem to shrink with horror, and he looks down upon, and listens to, the everlasting agitation of the howling waters. There are in his poetry feelings, thoughts, sentiments, and passions that we at once recognise to be human, though we know not whence they come; they break upon us like the sudden flash of a returning dream, like some wild cry from another world. And even those whose lives have had little experience of the wilder passions, for a moment feel that an unknown region of their own souls has been revealed to them, and that there are indeed fearful mysteries in our human

nature.

When this dark and powerful spirit for a while withdraws from the contemplation of his own wild world, and condescends to look upon the ordinary shows and spectacles of life, he often seems unexpectedly to participate in the feelings and emotions of beings with whom it might be thought he could claim no kindred; and

thus many passages are to be found in his poetry, of the most irresistible and overpowering pathos, in which the depth of his sympathy, with common sorrows and common sufferers, seems as if his nature knew nothing more mournful than sighs and tears.

We have no intention of drawing Lord Byron's poetical character, and have been led, we know not how, into these very general and imperfect observations. But perhaps the little we have said may in some degree show, why hitherto this great poet has dealt so seldom with the forms of the external world. He has so deeply looked into the soul of man, and so intensely sympathised with all the struggles there -that he has had no feelings or passions to fling away on the mere earth he inhabits. But it is evident that the same powers, which he has so gloriously exerted upon man as their subject, would kindle up and enlighten, or darken and disturb, the features of external nature; and that, if he so willed it, his poetry instead of being rife with wrath, despair, remorse, and all other agitating passions, might present an equally sublime assemblage of woods, glens, and mountains,-of lakes and rivers, cataracts, and oceans. In the third canto of Childe Harold, accordingly, he has delivered up his soul to the impulses of Nature, and we have seen how that high communion has elevated and sublimed it. He instantly penetrated into her heart as he had before into the heart of Man; and in a few months of solitary wandering among the Alps, his soul became as deeply embued with her glory and magnificence, as if, from youth, he had dedicated himself to no other power, and had forever devoutly worshipped at her altar. He leapt at once into the first rank of descriptive poets. He came into competition with Wordsworth upon his own ground, and with his own weapons; and in the first encount er, he vanquished and overthrew him. His description of the stormy night among the Alps-of the blending-the minglingthe fusion of his own soul, with the raging elements around him,-is alone worth all the dull metaphysics of the Excursion, and shows that he might enlarge the limits of human consciousness regarding the operations of matter upon mind, as widely as he has enlarged them regarding the operations of mind upon itself.

In the very singular and, we suspect, very imperfect poem, of which we are about to give a short account, Lord Byron has pursued the same course as in the third canto of Childe Harold, and put out his strength upon the same objects. The action is laid among the mountains of the Alps-the characters are all, more or less, formed or swayed by the operations of the magnificent scenery around them, and every page of the poem teems with imagery and passion, though, at the same time, the mind of the poet is often overborne, as it were, by the strength and novelty of its own conceptions; and thus the composition, as a whole, is liable to many and fatal objections.

But there is a still more novel exhibition of Lord Byron's powers in this extraordinary drama. He has here burst into the world of spirits; and in the wild delight with which the elements of nature seem to have inspired him, he has endeavoured to embody and

call up before him their ministering agents, and to employ these wild Personifications, as he formerly employed the feelings and passions of man. We are not prepared to say, that, in this daring attempt, he has completely succeeded. We are inclined to think that the plan he has conceived, and the principal character which he has wished to delineate, would require a fuller development than is here given to them; and accordingly, a sense of imperfection, incompleteness, and confusion, accompanies the mind throughout the perusal of the poem, owing either to some failure on the part of the poet, or to the inherent mystery of the subjcet. But though on that account it is difficult to comprehend distinctly the drift of the composition, and almost impossible to give any thing like a distinct account of it, it unquestionably exhibits many noble delineations of mountain scenery, many impressive and terrible pictures of passion, and many wild and awful visions of imaginary horror.

Manfred, whose strange and extraordinary sufferings pervade the whole drama, is a nobleman who has for many years led a solitary life in his castle among the Bernese Alps. From early youth he has been a wild misanthrope, and has so perplexed himself with his views of human nature, that he comes at last to have no fixed principles of belief on any subject,-to be perpetually haunted by a dread of the soul's mortality, and bewildered among dark and gloomy ideas concerning the existence of a First Cause. We cannot do better than let this mysterious personage speak for himself. In a conversation, which we find him holding by the side of a mountain-cataract, with the Witch of the Alps,' whom he raises up by a spell beneath the arch of the sun-beam of the torrent,' we find him thus speaking:

'Man. Well, though it torture me, 'tis but the same;
My pang shall find a voice. From my youth upwards
My spirit walk'd not with the souls of men,

Nor look'd upon the earth with human eyes;
The thirst of their ambition was not mine,

The aim of their existence was not mine;

My joys, my griefs, my passions, and my powers,
Made me a stranger; though I wore the form,

I had no sympathy with breathing flesh,
Nor midst the creatures of clay that guided me
Was there but one who-but of her anon.
I said, with men, and with the thoughts of men,
I held but slight communion; but instead,
My joy was in the wilderness, to breathe
The difficult air of the iced mountain's top,
Where the birds dare not build, nor insect's wing
Flit o'er the herbless granite; or to plunge
Into the torrent, and to roll along

On the swift whirl of the new-breaking wave
Of river, stream, or ocean, in their flow.
In these my early strength exulted; or

To follow through the night the moving moon,

The stars and their development; or catch
The dazzling lightnings till my eyes grew dim;
Or to look, list'ning, on the scatter'd leaves,
While autumn winds were at their evening song.
These were my pastimes, and to be alone;
For if the beings, of whom I was one,-
Hating to be so,-cross'd me in my path,
I felt myself degraded back to them,
And was all clay again. And then I dived,
In my lone wanderings, to the caves of death,
Searching its cause in its effect; and drew
From wither'd bones, and sculls, and heap'd up dust,
Conclusions most forbidden. Then I pass'd
The nights of years in sciences untaught,
Save in the old time; and with time and toil,
And terrible ordeal, and such penance
As in itself hath power upon the air,
And spirits that do compass air and earth,
Space and the peopled infinite, I made

Mine eyes

familiar with Eternity.'

In another scene of the drama, where a pious old abbot vainly endeavours to administer to his troubled spirit the consolations of religion, he still farther illustrates his own character.

Man. Ay.-Father! I have had those earthly visions
And noble aspirations in my youth,

To make my own the mind of other men,
The enlightener of nations; and to rise
I knew not whither-it might be to fall;
But fall, even as the mountain-cataract,
Which having leapt from its more dazzling height,
Even in the foaming strength of its abyss,
(Which cast up misty columns, that become
Clouds raining from the re-ascended skies),
Lies low, but mighty still.-But this is past,
My thoughts mistook themselves.

Abbot.

And wherefore so?

Man. I could not tame my nature down; for he
Must serve who fain would sway-and soothe-and sue-

And watch all time-and pry into all place

And be a living lie-who would become

A mighty thing amongst the mean, and such
The mass are; I disdain to mingle with

A herd, though to be leader-and of wolves.
The lion is alone, and so am I.

Abbot. And why not live and act with other men?
Man. Because niy nature was averse from life,
And yet not cruel; for I would not make,
But find a desolation;-like the wind,
The red-hot breath of the most lone Simoom,
Which dwells but in the desert, and sweeps o'er
The barren sands which bear no shrubs to blast,

And revels o'er their wild and arid waves,
And seeketh not, so that it is not sought,
But being met is deadly, such hath been
The course of my existence; but there came
Things in my path which are no more.'

But besides the anguish and perturbation produced by his fatal scepticism in regard to earth and heaven, vice and virtue, man and God, Manfred's soul has been stained by one secret and dreadful sin, and is bowed down by the weight of blood. It requires to read the drama with more than ordinary attention, to discover the full import of those broken, short, and dark expressions, by which he half confesses, and half conceals, even from himself, the perpetration of this inexpiable guilt. In a conversation with a chamois-hunter, in his Alpine cottage, he thus suddenly breaks out:

'Man. Away, away! there's blood upon the brim!
Will it then never-never sink in the earth?

C. Hun. What dost thou mean? thy senses wander from thee.
Man. I say 'tis blood-my blood! the pure warm stream

Which ran in the veins of my fathers, and in ours,

When we were in our youth, and had one heart,
And loved each other as we should not love,

And this was shed; but still it rises up,

Colouring the clouds that shut me out from Heaven,
Where thou art not-and I shall never be.'

He afterwards says:

'My injuries came down on those who loved me—
On those whom I best loved-I never quelled

An enemy save in my just defence,

But my embrace was fatal.'

In the conversation formerly referred to with the Witch of the Alps,' he alludes still darkly to the same event.

'Man. But to my task. I have not named to thee,

Father, or mother, mistress, friend, or being,
With whom I wore the chain of human ties;
If I had such, they seem'd not such to me--
Yet there was one-

Witch. Spare not thyself-proceed.

Man. She was like me in lineaments-her eyes,
Her hair, her features, all, to the very tone
Even of her voice, they said were like to mine;
But soften'd all, and temper'd into beauty;

She had the same lone thoughts and wanderings,
The quest of hidden knowledge, and a mind
To comprehend the universe; nor these
Alone, but with them gentler powers than mine,
Pity, and smiles, and tears—which I had not;
And tenderness-but that I had for her;

Humility-and that I never had.

Her faults were mine-her virtues were her own--
I lov'd her, and destroy'd her!