opening the door of her little parlour to leave her own lodging, she saw standing directly opposite to her in the passage, the exact resemblance of Captain Campbell, in his complete Highland dress, with belted plaid, dirk, pistols, pouch, and broad sword. Appalled at this vision, she started back, closed the door of the room, staggered backwards to a chair, and endeavoured to convince herself that the apparition she had seen was only the effect of a heated imagination. In this, being a woman of a strong mind, she partly succeeded, yet could not prevail upon herself again to open the door which seemed to divide her from the shade of her deceased relation, until she heard a tap on the floor beneath, which was the usual signal from her friendly neighbours to summon her to tea. On this she took courage, walked firmly to the door of the apartment, flung it open, and again beheld the military spectre of the deceased officer of the Black Watch. He seemed to stand within a yard of her, and held his hand stretched out, not in a menacing manner, but as if to prevent her passing him. This was too much for human fortitude to endure, and she sunk down in the floor, with a noise which alarmed her friends below for her safety. On their hastening up stairs, and entering Mrs -'s lodging, they saw nothing extraordinary in the passage; but in the parlour found the lady in strong hysterics. She was recalled to herself with difficulty, but concealed the extraordinary cause of her indisposition. Her friends naturally imputed it to the late unpleasant intelligence from Argyleshire, and remain ed with her till a late hour, endeavouring to amuse and relieve her mind. The hour of rest however arrived, and there was a necessity, (which Mrs felt an alarming one,) that she should go to her solitary apartment. She had scarce set down the light which she held in her hand, and was in the act of composing her mind, ere addressing the Deity for protection during the perils of the night, when, turning her head, the vision she had seen in the passage was standing in the apartment. On this emergency she summoned up her courage, and addressing him by his name and surname, conjured him in the name of Heaven to tell her wherefore he thus haunted her. The apparition instantly answered, with a voice and manner in no respect differing from those proper to him while alive,Cousin, why did you not speak sooner,-my visit is but for your good, your grief disturbs me in my grave, and it is by permission of the Father of the fatherless and Husband of the widow, that I come to tell you not to be disheartened by my fate, but to pursue the line which, by my advice, you adopted for your son. He will find a protector more efficient, and as kind as I would have been; will rise high in the military profession, and live to close your eyes.' With these words the figure, representing Captain Campbell, completely vanished. Upon the point of her being decidedly awake and sensible, through her eyes and ears, of the presence and words of this apparition, Mrs declared herself perfectly convinced. She said, when minutely questioned by the lady who told me the story, that his general appearance differed in no respect from that which he presented when in full life and health, but that in the last occasion, while she fixed her eyes on the spectre in terror and anxiety, yet with a curiosity which argued her to be somewhat familiarized with his presence, she observed a speck or two of blood upon his breast, ruffle, and band, which he seemed to conceal with his hand when he observed her looking at him. He changed his attitude more than once, but slightly, and without altering his general position. The fate of the young gentleman in future life seemed to correspond with the prophecy. He entered the army, rose to considerable rank, and died in peace and honour, long after he had closed the eyes of the good old lady who had determined, or at least professed to have determined, his destination in life upon this marvellous suggestion. It would have been easy for a skilful narrator to give this tale more effect, by a slight transference or trifling exaggeration of the circumstances. But the author has determined in this and future communications to limit himself strictly to his authorities, and rests your humble servant, SIMON SHADOW. FOURTH CANTO OF CHILDE HAROLD. It would be worse than idle to endeavour to shadow out the lineaments of that Mind, which, exhibiting itself in dark and perturbed grandeur, has established a stronger and wider sway over the passions of men, than any other poetical Intellect of modern times. We feel as if there were a kind of absurdity in criticising the power that hurries us along with it like a whirlwind. When standing within the magic circle, and in the immediate presence of the magician, we think not upon his art itself, but yield ourselves up to its wonder-working influence. We have no wish to speculate on the causes which awoke and stirred up all the profoundest feelings and energies of our souls,—the deep pathos, the stormy passion, has been enjoyed or suffered, and, in the exaltation or prostration of our nature, we own the power of the poet to be divine, and, with a satisfied and unquestioning delight, deliver ourselves up to his gentle fascination, or his ir resistible dominion. We do not say that Byron stands above criticism-but that criticism seems to be altogether foreign to the nature and to the purposes of his genius. It is impossible to speak of his poetry without also speaking of himself, morally, as a man; and this, who shall dare to do, who has had even a feeble glimpse into the haunted darkness of the human soul? In his poetry, more than any other man's, there is felt a continual presence of himself -there is everlasting self-representation or self-reference; and perhaps that, which to cold and unimpassioned judgment might seem the essential fault of his poetry, constitutes its real excellence, and gives it power, sovereign and despotical. Strictly speaking, and according to the rules by which great poems have been builded, it cannot be said that Byron has ever created a great Poem. He has celebrated no mighty exploit, or event, or revolution in the destinies of mankind; nor brought before us one majestic portion of the history of our species, in which, as in a course perfect and complete, the mind of man Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto the Fourth; by Lord Byron, 8vo. pp. 258. London, Murray. 1818. has been seen to run a career of power and glory. He has brought forward from the darkness of past times, no shining spectres-no immortal ghosts. One Figure alone is seen stalking through the city and through the solitude over the earth and over the sea and that Figure, stern, melancholy, and majestic, is still no other than Himself, on the same dark, mournful, solitary, and perplexing Pilgrimage. "The wondrous Childe" passes before our eyes, and before our hearts, and before our souls. And all love, and pity, and condemn, and turn away in aversion, and return with sympathy; and "thoughts that do lie too deep for tears" alike agitate the young and the old,-the guilty and the sinless,—the pious and the profane,-when they think on the features of his troubled countenance,when they hear the voice of his lofty mournings,-when they meditate on all the "disastrous chances that his youth has suffered." There is round him a more awful interest than the mere halo round the brow of a poet. And in his feelings, his passions, his musings, his aspirings, his troubled scepticism, and his high longings after immortality, his eagle-winged raptures, his cold, dull, leaden fears, his agonies, his exultation, and his despair,-we tremble to think unto what a mysterious nature we belong, and hear in his strains, as it were, the awful music of a revelation. We have no hesitation in saying, that Byron's creations are not so much poems, as they are glorious manifestations of a poet's mind, all irresistibly tending towards poetry. Having in himself deep sense of beauty-deeper passions than probably any other great poet ever had and aspiring conceptions of power, the poetry in which he expresses himself must be full of vivid portraiture of beauty, deep spirit of passion, and daring suggestions of power. It is obvious that he has never yet soared to his utmost pitch. He is the poet of the age from whom most is to be expected. For there are things in his poetry-strong and irregular bursts of power, beyond the strength of the strongest. At times he seems possessed and over-mastered by an inspiration. A spirit is then in him that works at will, and it is a spirit that in its perfect grandeur seems to have visited none other of the children of men. The popular belief, that his heroes are himself, is a true belief; and the world has at last convinced the poet of that which he had at first but indistinctly understood, and imperfectly believed. His heroes are himself that is, either what he is, or has been, or what he would wish or fear to be. Whatever may have been his intention, there is in his mind a predominant consciousness of himself, which determines the character he draws. This appears most in the first two Cantos of Childe Harold, where his mind seems so enslaved to itself, that it cannot escape even from a direct journal of his own travels. But much more than his characters are drawn from himself. Almost every feeling, passion, thought, or image, or represented object in his poetry, has magnitude and interest assigned to it, not in proportion to its plan in the poem, but to its direct interest to his own mind, and not to his imagination, but to his passions, and his life of passion. He thus seems seldom to go back to the early periods even of his own mind, and then but by fits and starts-but to be continually living in the last, almost the present years of his life. His is indeed a mind under the dominion of its passions, and which cannot escape from them even in imagination. This may, indeed must, make a sameness in his writings. But in proportion to their sameness is their varieriety. It is almost incredible, that a man producing continually the same passions and the same feelings, should produce them, as he has done, in such continual change of shape, that we never complain of repetition. This can only be owing to the unequalled intenseness of passion, which, like the power of life, is endlessly unfolding itself in new forms. It can only be the simple, natural, human force of the vivid utterance of intense passion, that produces in minds of every description so strong a sympathy with Byron in all his different moods, and too often, in spite of reluctance and repugnance, of moral and intellectual condemnation. But does not the question naturally arise, Is this the best, the noblest poetry? Is it fitting, is it truly great, that a highly-gifted spirit, potent by nature, and enriched by the highest studies, should voluntarily circumVOL. III. scribe the sphere of its dominion that its power may be more despotical? Or if it be not a free agent, is there not something degrading to the soul of man in the idea, that inward disease or outward affliction can subjugate under its yoke him, who, nevertheless, would seem to despise subjugation, and who vainly imagines that he can display the spirit of freedom in the majestic air with which he drags his chains? He We must all feel that Byron, with all his mighty faculties, is at times only shielded from contempt, by the conviction that many of his miseries are selfinflicted. They are often imaginary; and therefore is it that our imagination redeems him who awakens it. exasperates his soul into agony. He sinks it down into despair. But genius breathes forth the profoundest sighs that disturb us, and often converts them, in an instant, into an exulting hymn. And often the long majestic sweep of sorrow, that winds up a subduing stanza, is suddenly succeeded by airy music, as if in derision of the melancholy close; and Byron's soul bounds exultingly forward, escaping from the dim cell into which it had retired in voluntary imprisonment. Many awful lessons may certainly be learned from the poetry of Lord Byron. Yet, undoubtedly, there are many things there barren and unavailing. The good, the happy, and the innocent, can draw no instruction from what they cannot imagine even in dreams; while the erring or passion-stricken spirit contemplates, too often, the ruins as it were of its own nature, without hope of the temple being rebuilt, or if so, ever again being animated with the spirit that is fled. Of the danger resulting from such poetry to souls of fine aspirations, but unsteadfast wills,-to souls where passion is the only or chief impulse, and where there is a tendency to hold cheap, and in derision, the dull duties of ordinary life, and at the same time not strength sufficient to grasp and master the objects of a more ambitious existence,-to such souls (and they are numerous among the youth of Britain,) that poetry is most fatal which flings aside the antiquated bonds consecrated by mere every-day associations, which renders reason itself subservient to the senses (ennobled as they are by the imagination), and ad2 E mits no other laws of life but the tyrannic passions, cherished in the conscious pride of that power, which, in turn, uses those passions as its most abject slaves. If such may be the effects of Byron's poetry on good natures, it is to be feared that it may exert a lamentable influence over those prone to evil. There must appear in the splendour, and power, and majesty, wherein his genius enshrouds feelings and passions intrinsically worthless or pernicious, a fatal justification of that evil, from which, in its native nakedness, even the fallen spirit would turn with aversion. When virtue is dead, pride often remains in full life. It firmly fastens on representations like these, by which a veil is thrown over its own meanness,—and a false but dazzling world is thus created for it, wherein it may move, and act as bold and fearless a part as virtue herself walking in her untroubled beauty. To Byron, and to great though erring spirits like his, we mournfully allow the privilege of his pride. It is a It is a shirt of mail wherewith he would seek to guard his bosom from the shafts of sorrow. And it may be, that its folds sometimes indeed repel those "unkindest blows of all," against whose infliction the soul hath no other shield in its solitude. But with them whose passions tend only towards mere earthly objects-unsanctified by genius or by grief-reckless, importunate, and selfish-sacrificing to their indulgence, without compunction, the happiness of other hearts-how pernicious must that philosophy be (and the poetry of Byron is but too full of it), that lends robes of royalty, and a seeming sceptre to passions that are in themselves base, odious, and contemptible, or, haply, such as conduct to ruin, agony, and death. There is one school of poetry (we use the word somewhat unwillingly) from which this great Poet has already learned much, and from which his noble nature may yet learn more-the poetry of the Lakes. Byron need not be ashamed-nay, he must exult to be instructed by the wisdom of Wordsworth. Nothing can impair the originality of his genius; little need be added to its power. But a warning voice may arise from the untroubled magnificence of the mountain solitude, and the wandering "Childe" may pause in the darkest track of his pilgrimage, to hear the calm, pure, lofty anthem that the poet sings to nature in the sinless happiness which she has created, sanctified, and blest against violence or decay. Lord Byron seems to have roamed through the Alps with the spirit of Wordsworth often at his side-and his soul was elevated by the communion. It is cold and unmeaning to say, that in the third canto of Childe Harold, he imitated or competed with the author of the Excursion. He followed him-he was led by him-to the same eternal fountain of all beauty and all grandeur. Different as are the souls of these two illustrious men, nature bowed them down or elevated them up into similitude; so that in Byron's glorious songs among the Alps, we see the same soul at work that had before sublimed the mountains of England,—and are delighted to behold how the calm wisdom of contemplative age and recluse philosophy can purify, and sustain, and strengthen, the impetuous energy of a wilder spirit, revelling deliriously among the maddening magnificence of nature. It would lead us into a most interesting, but difficult and long inquiry, were we to endeavour clearly to point out the connexion subsisting between much of Byron's late poetry, and the spirit of Wordsworth's and of some of his disciples. This we purpose doing on a future occasion. Suffice it to say, that such spiritual communion between two great poets, in many things so unlike, is honourable to both,-—and we fear not that we shall soon see the day, when Byron, escaping from the too severe dominion of his own passions, shall look abroad over nature with a wider sweep of speculation,— become a happier, a better, a greater man, as the benign influences of nature are suffered to enter, unopposed, into the recesses of his heart, and that the penance which he has for so long endured, and often self-inflicted, shall be found to have fitted and disposed his soul for the reception and love of those lofty and universal truths, on which alone a splendid poetical reputation can ultimately rest, and by which alone he can hope to be of essential and lasting benefit to his fellow-mortals. He knows, that the great poet to whom we have alluded, though accused of bigotry, infatu ation, and narrowness of view, has taken ampler and pobler prospects of the soul of man than any other living mind. He knows the depths of the calm of that wisdom, which the storms of the world cannot disturb. He knows that poetry is a divine artthat its influences are divine. And all may see scattered throughout the darkest scenery of his own soul, lights that seem as if they would fain break through the gloom, and that wait but for his will to shine on him and his spirit for evermore, and make him, what every great poet should be, the glad, exulting, hoping, undismayed, friend and vindicator of the immortal destinies of man. We said, that we should not criticise, and we have accordingly thrown out merely a few unformed feelings and reflections, which many of our readers may think but little illustrative of the subject immediately before us. But we may have touched a string, perhaps, in some meditative heart, and afforded food for thought to those who love to think and feel for themselves, and who, on that account, are contented to peruse with pleasure the most wandering reveries of others, when they seem to tend, at least, towards what is right and beautiful. We shall now give some extracts from the last, and perhaps the finest canto of Childe Harold, the finest, beyond all comparison, of Byron's poems. At the opening of the Fourth Canto, the Poet represents himself as standing upon a Bridge of Venice, and indulging himself in such a train of meditations as might well be excited by the decaying splendour, unexpected desertedness, and ancient glories of this romantic city. 1. I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs; I saw from out the wave her structures rise She looks a sea Cybele, fresh from ocean, From spoils of nations, and the exhaustless East showers. Pour'd in her lap all gems in sparkling In Venice Tasso's echoes are no more, die, He then seems tacitly to reproach himself for taking all the subjects of his musing from among strangers, and bursts into one of the few truly patriotic pieces of poetry which are to be found in his works. 9. Perhaps I loved it well and should I lay Are honoured by the nations-let it be Sparta hath many a worthier son than he.' Meantime I seek no sympathies, nor need; The thorns which I have reaped are of the tree |