Of fiery climes he made himself a home,

And his soul drank their sunbeams: he was girt
With strange and dusky aspects; he was not
Himself like what he had been; on the sea
And on the shore he was a wanderer;
There was a mass of many images
Crowded like waves upon me; but he was
A part of all; and in the last he lay
Reposing from the noontide sultriness,
Couched among fallen columns, in the shade
Of ruined walls that had survived the names
Of those who reared them; by his sleeping side
Stood camels grazing, and some goodly steeds
Were fastened near a fountain; and a man
Clad in a flowing garb did watch the while,
While many of his tribe slumbered around;
And they were canopied by the blue sky,
So cloudless, clear, and purely beautiful,
That God alone was to be seen in heaven !"

It was now, too, that the poet's love of external nature expanded more. No poet ever enjoyed finer or more various opportunities of communion with the earth and the elements. He was a denizen of ocean and of lake, of Alpine regions and of Greek and Italian plains. He had a poet's quick susceptibility to the tumultuous sublimity and the placid beauty of the world of sense that surrounded him. There were times when his heart was open to these natural influences, so that there arose the true poetic sympathy between the inner world of spirit and the outer world of sense. The finest passages of the "Childe Harold" are those in which nature had her will with this wayward child :

"Clear, placid Leman! thy contrasted lake,
With the wild world I dwelt in, is a thing

Which warns me, with its stillness, to forsake
Earth's troubled waters for a purer spring.
This quiet sail is as a noiseless wing

To waft me from distraction. Once I loved
Torn Ocean's roar; but thy soft murmuring
Sounds sweet as if a sister's voice reproved

That I with stern delights should e'er have been so moved.

"It is the hush of night, and all between

The margin and the mountains, dusk, yet clear,
Mellowed and mingling, yet distinctly seen,
Save darkened Jura, whose capt heights appear
Precipitously steep; and, drawing near,
There breathes a living fragrance from the shore,
Of flowers yet fresh with childhood; on the ear
Drops the light drip of the suspended oar,

Or chirps the grasshopper one good-night carol more.

*

*

*

*

*

O night,

66 The sky is changed!—and such a change!
And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong,
Yet lovely in your strength, as is the light
Of a dark eye in woman! Far along,
From peak to peak the rattling crags among,
Leaps the live thunder! Not from one lone cloud,
But every mountain now hath found a tongue,
And Jura answers, through her misty shroud,
Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud!

"And this is in the night. Most glorious night!
Thou wert not sent for slumber! Let me be
A sharer in thy fierce and free delight,-

A portion of the tempest and of thee!

How the lit lake shines,-a phosphoric sea,-
And the big rain comes dancing to the earth!
And now again 'tis black."

I would gladly break the quotation here, in the middle of the stanza, in order not to break the im

pression of a passage of such true poetry, which I would always wish to leave unimpaired; but (it vexes me to be obliged to use this qualifying particle but) there follows a striking exemplification of those tumid exaggerations which are the weakness mingled with the poet's power :

"And now the glee

Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain-mirth,

As if they did rejoice o'er a young earthquake's birth.”

The love of nature with Byron was passionate rather than either thoughtful or imaginative :

"A feeling, and a love,

That had no need of a remoter charm

By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye."

He knew, however, that it was necessary to make it something more,-that a great descriptive poet cannot rest contented with what is an appetite and a rapture. One of poetry's grandest purposes-the showing how the external world and the mind of man fitted to each other

-was before him. His strong poetic instincts struggled towards it, but the moral weakness of his genius perverted and lowered his aspirations. The blindness of idolatry came over him; the world of sight and sound became a divinity to him. That which was intended for only the means for higher ends became all in all to him. The material world, which its Creator formed to minister food not only to our bodily wants but to the imaginative ap. petites, which feed on the grand and beautiful that meet the senses, hemmed his faithless spirit in, not because of its strength, which many have mistaken its turbulence for,

but because of its weakness.

In this I do not fear to

say the imagination of Byron failed: it had not strength to extricate itself from the sophistries of materialism. The strong passion for nature with which he was doubtless gifted, the moment he strove to make it any thing more than a passion, spent itself in misty, cloudy rhapsodies, meaningless of every thing but the old errors of a sensual philosophy. The days of fascination gone by, it is time to understand that when Byron's poetry begins to utter materialism it begins to utter folly, and then it ceases to be poetry, for poetry is allied to wisdom and madness. The poet had set up for his worship an idol as helpless as the headless trunk of Dagon. Quenching the true and spiritual love of nature, he talked of making the mountains his friends, and boasted that it was man's noblest companionship; but his heart told him, "Miserable friends are ye." It was his pride to love earth only for its "earthly sake," and to talk unmeaningly of becoming "a portion of that around him," of "high mountains being a feeling to him," and that he could see

"Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be

A link reluctant in that fleshly chain,
Classed among creatures, when the soul can flee,
And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain
Of ocean, and the stars, mingle, and not in vain.

"And when at length the mind shall be all free
From what it hates in this degraded form,
Reft of its carnal life, save what shall be
Existent happier in the fly and worm,-
Where elements to elements conform
And dust is as it should be,—shall I not

Feel all I see, less dazzling but more warm?
The bodiless thought,-the spirit of each spot,-

Of which even now I share at times the immortal lot?”

Now, strip this, and the multitude of passages like it in Byron's poems, of all that is fantastic; measure it, as you please, either by the practical rules of common sense, or by the ethereal standard of the imagination, and what is it but the perplexity and the folly of materialism? What natural instinct is there, let me ask, so strong in the human heart as that which recoils from the dread anticipation that this living flesh of ours, or the cherished features of those that are dear to us, will be fed upon by worms in the grave?—a thought that would crush us down in helpless abasement but for the one bright hope beyond. And then to think of a poet exulting in the prospect of that remnant of his carnal life "existent happier in the worm"! When Byron is honoured as the great poet of nature, I wish you to understand where he will lead his disciple and where he will desert him. The material world has high and appropriate uses in the building up of a moral being: the study of it in the right spirit is full of instruction, but worthless and perilous if we lose sight of the great truth of the soul's spiritual supremacy over it, that there is implanted in each human being an undying particle, destined to outlive not this earth alone, but the universe. The poet sent his materialized imagination to roam over the world of sense, ocean and mountain, seeking what the world could not give. "Where shall wisdom be found, and where is the place of understanding? The depth saith, It is not in me; and the sea saith, It is not with me.”*

The frailty of Byron's imagination is betrayed not only in his abandonment of the spiritual principle within

* Job, chap. xxvi. 2.