Had power to kill—yet, strange to tell! (1) [Here follow in MS. "Nor slew I of my subjects one What sovereign Chath so little yet so much hath done?”—E] (2) [It has not been the purpose of Lord Byron to paint the peculiar character of Bonnivard. The object of the poem, like that of Sterne's celebrated sketch of the prisoner, is to consider captivity in the abstract, and to mark its effects in gradually chilling the mental powers as it benumbs and freezes the animal frame, until the unfortunate victim becomes, as it were, a part of his dungeon, and identified with his chains. This transmutation we believe to be founded on fact: at least, in the Low Countries, where solitude for life is substituted for capital punishments, something like it may be witnessed. On particular days in the course of the year, these victims of a jurisprudence which calls itself humane, are presented to the public eye, upon a stage erected in the open market-place, apparently to prevent their guilt and their punishment from being forgotten. It is scarcely possible to witness a sight more degrading to humanity than this exhibition: - with matted hair, wild looks and haggard features, with eyes dazzled by the unwonted light of the sun, and ears deafened and astounded by the sudden exchange of the silence of a dungeon for the busy hum of men, the wretches sit more like rude images fashioned to a fantastic imitation of humanity, than like living and reflecting beings. In the course of time we are assured they generally become either madmen or idiots, as mind or matter happens to predominate, when the mysterious balance between them is destroyed. It will readily be allowed that this singular poem is more powerful than pleasing. The dungeon of Bonnivard is, like that of Ugolino, a subject too dismal for even the power of the painter or poet to counteract its horrors. It is the more disagreeable as affording human hope no anchor to rest upon, and describing the sufferer, though a man of talents and virtues, as altogether inert and powerless under his accumulated sufferings: yet, as a picture, however gloomy the colouring, it may rival any which Lord Byron has drawn; nor is it possible to read it without a sinking of the heart, corresponding with that which he describes the victim to have suffered.-SIR WALTER SCOTT.] THE DREAM. (1) (1) [In the first draught of this poem, Lord Byron had entitled it " The Destiny." Mr. Moore says, "it cost him many a tear in writing," and justly characterises it as "the most mournful, as well as picturesque 'story of a wandering life' that ever came from the pen and heart of man." was composed at Diodati, in July 1816.- E] It THE DREAM. I. OUR life is twofold: Sleep hath its own world, A boundary between the things misnamed Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world, And a wide realm of wild reality, And dreams in their developement have breath, A portion of ourselves as of our time, They pass like spirits of the past, they speak I would recall a vision which I dream'd II. I saw two beings in the hues of youth |