Childe Harold's Pilgrimage undertakes an Idea—that of a proud spirit, born in a castle, self-driven from the bosom of home, seeking refuge, solace, renovation, from Nature, of sensibilities worn out with enjoyment. Or, he brings into play a neglected, unused sensibility—the joy of the Sublime and the Beautiful. We receive, as given, a mind gifted with extraordinary powers of will and understanding—by the favour of birth, nursed upon the heights of society—conversant with pleasure and passion; and, bearing all this constantly in mind, we must read the poem. From it large passages might be selected, in which the scorn, despite, bitterness that elsewhere break in, disfeaturing beauty and sublimity, are silent; and the passion of divine beholding stands out alone. Is this the character—or what is the character, of the celebrated concluding Address to the Ocean? Few things in modern poetry have been more universally—more indiscriminately admired; be it ours now to recite with you the famous Stanzas—and here, sitting beneath the sea-fronting porch of our Marine Villa, indulge in a confabulatory critique.

The Wanderings are at an end. The real and the imaginary pilgrim, standing together upon Mount Albano, look out upon the blue Mediterranean. He has generously, honourably, magnanimously, thrown upon the ground the checkered mantle of scorn, anger, disappointment, sorrow, and ennui, which had wrapped in disguise his fair stature and features; and he stands a restored, or at least an escaped man, gazing with eye and soul upon the beautiful and majestic sea rolling in its joy beneath his feet. He looks; and he will deliver himself up, as Nature's lone enthusiast, to the delicious, deep, dread, exulting, holy passion of—vary the word as he varies it—The Ocean.

Let us chant—with broken, though haply not unmusical voice—what may be called—the Hymn. That is a high term—let us not anticipate that it has been misapplied. Childe Harold, or Lord Byron—for it here little matters whether a grace of pleased fancy resolve the Two into One, or show the Two side by side, noble forms in brotherly reflection—here is at last the powerful but self-encumbered Spirit with whom we have journeyed so long in sunlight and in storm—delighted, sympathising, wondering at least, or confounded and angry when he will not let us wonder—here He is at last himself, in unencumbered strength, setting like the sun upon the sea he gazes on—the clouds broken through, dispersed, and vanquished, even if a half-tinge of melancholy remembrance hang in the atmosphere, radiant in majestic farewell.

These Stanzas may be separated from the Poem—the feeling of readers innumerable so separates them—as a Hymn to the Ocean. The passage, a great effort of a great poet, intends a final putting forth of all his power—it has been acknowledged and renowned as such; and, if it has failed, a critique showing this, and showing the ground of the failure, maybe useful to you, inexperienced yet in the criticism of poetry, though all alive to its charm.

We observe you delight in the first Four Stanzas—ay, you recite them over again after us—and the voice of youth, tremulous in emotion, is pathetic to the Old Man. He will not seek, by what might seem to you, thus moved, hypercritical objections to some of the words; but, pleased with your pleasure, he is willing to allow you to believe the stanzas entirely good in expression as in thought. For here the morbid disrelish of the sated palate is cleansed away. The obscuring cloud of the overwhelmed heart is dispersed. The joy of the wilderness here claimed is not necessarily more or other than that of every powerful and imaginative spirit, which experiences that solitude is, in simple truth, by a steadfast law of our nature, the condition under which our soul is able to wed itself in impassioned communion effectually to the glorious Universe—where, too, the subjugating footsteps of man, impairing the pure domain of free nature, are not. "Pathless," "lonely,"—of themselves bespeak neither satiety nor hostility: there is "society by the deep sea, and music in its roar!" all quite right. Here is a heart, in its thirst for sympathy, peopling the desert with sympathisers. Here is expansion of the heart; and the spirit that rejoices in the consciousness of life roused into creative activity. For an ear untuned and untuning, here is one that listens out harmonies which you, languid or inept, might not discern. "Pleasure!" "rapture!" "society!" "music!"—a chain of genialities!

What will you require of kindliest humanity from any poet, from any lover of nature, that is not here? The savage grandeur of earth and sea have their peril—the fleeing of human homes and haunts—the voluptuous banishment self-imposed—the caressing of dear fancies in secret invisible recesses inviolable—these tend all to engendering and nurturing an excessive self-delight akin to an usurping self-love; and the very sublimities of that wonderful intercourse, in which, upon the one part, stands the feeble dwarf Man, in his hour-lived weakness, and upon the other, as if Infinitude itself putting on cognisable forms, the imperishable Hills and the unchangeable Sea—that intercourse in which he, the pigmy, conscious of the divinity within him, feels himself the greater—he infinite, immortal, and these finite and vanishing—the power and exultation of that intercourse may well engender and nourish Pride. Self-love and Pride, tempting, decoying, bewildering, devouring demons of the inhuman Waste! But the self-reproved, repentant pilgrim has well understood these dangers. He knows that the delight of woods and waterfalls, of stars and storms, may alienate man from his fellow-man. He has guarded himself by some wise temperance. He has found here his golden mean. From thus conversing, he "loves not man the less, but nature more." Is this a young Wordsworth, beginning, in the school of nature, to learn the wisdom of humanity?

At all events, here is, for the occasion, the most express and earnest disclaimer of the mood of misanthropy; and we rejoice to hear the Pilgrim speak of interviews

From all! that is, from all the ungracious, the harsh, the unkind, the sore, the embittered, the angry, the miserable! Not, surely, from all the amiable and all the gladsome; and especially not from the whole personality and identity of his character. The picture he had given us of himself was that of a powerful mind, self-set at war with its kind, yet within an exasperated hate ever and anon unfolding undestroyed, sometimes hardly vitiated, some portion of its original ingenerate faculty of love. Here we behold him now as God made him, and no longer possessed by a demon. Change his rhyme into our prose—and you do not dislike our prose—and in sober and sincere sadness the Childe thus speaks—"I steal, under the power of these delicious, renovating, gladdening, hallowing influences, out of myself—out of that evil thing which man had made me—rather, alas! which I had made myself into;—and if long wandering, disuse of humanity, separation from the scene of my wrongs, and this auspicious dominion of inviolate nature have in these past years already amended me—if I have been worse than I am—even that worse and that worst these 'interviews' obliterate and extinguish." The soured milk of human kindness is again sweetened. Or, if that be too much to say, at least man, with all the dissonance that hangs by his name and recollections, is forgotten, suspended—for the time absolutely lost. If this be not the meaning, what is?

is indeed powerless writing, and the stanza merited a better close. But the whole stanza protests, proclaims the glad healing power of the natural world over him. He has described this as well as he could, and sums up with saying that by him it is indescribable. "I derive from these communions a rapturous transformation—so great, so wondrous, that my ignorant skill of words is utterly unable to render it; but, at the same time, so self-powerful, that, in despite of this my concealing inability, tones of it will outbreak, make themselves heard, felt, and understood." Thus Byron sets the tune of his Address to the Ocean. The first Four Stanzas, therefore, be their poetry more or less, required, upon this account, enucleation; and further, dear Neophyte, inasmuch as they are particularly humane, they should take their effectual place among evidences which separate him personally from some of his poetical Timons.

You—dear Neophyte—have called the Four Stanzas beautiful,—that is enough for us,—and they recall to your heart—you say—the kindred lines of Coleridge—which we call "beautiful exceedingly."—

Thus—we repeat our words—"Byron sets the tune of his Address to the Ocean."

The poem, then, is an Address to the Ocean by a Lover of the Ocean. It seems reasonable, then, to ask, first, what is it natural to expect that such a poem should be? And if it proves to be something remarkably different, then to inquire whether any particular circumstance or condition has intervened which justifies the poet in following an unexpected course.

Now, for natural expectation, the theme is one of eulogy; and one may say, therefore, that praise customarily expresses itself in one or other of two principal ways—namely, directly or indirectly. We praise directly, for instance, when, moved by the contemplation of some great or interesting subject, we single forth, one after another, the qualities of its character, or the facts in its history, which have provoked our love, our admiration, our joy, our gratitude. Upon the other hand, we praise indirectly when we extol the subject of our eulogy by dispraising another foreign subject, which we oppose to the chosen one in the way of relief or foil; whether we establish mere comparison of contrast between the two, or cite an opposition of actual enmity between them—as if, in hymning Apollo, we should insist upon the horror and fury, the earth-pollution and the earth-affliction, of the monster Python.

A moment of reflection satisfies us that both ways are alike natural—both, with occasion, alike unavoidable; but it is impossible to help equally seeing that these two ways of eulogy differ materially from each other in two respects,—the temper of inspiration which dictates, animates, and supports the one or other manner of attributing renown, and the motive justifying the one eulogistic procedure or the other. The temper of direct praise is always wholly genial; that of lauding by illaudation has in it perforce an ungenial element. The motive to direct praise eternally subsists and is there, as long as the subject eulogised subsists and is there. This, then, is the ordinary method. If any thing has just happened that provokes the indirect way—as if Python has just been vanquished—then good and well; or if the poet, by some personal haunting sorrow, or by an unvanquished idiosyncrasy, must arrive at pleasure through pain, so be it: but this method is clearly extraordinary and exceptive to the rule; and the reason for using it must be prominent, definite, and flashing in all men's eyes. The other method never can require justifying—this does always; and if it fail conspicuously in aught, the very opposite effect to that intended is produced, and the eulogy is no laud. You may say, indeed, and say truly, that all eulogy shall be mixed—that naturally and necessarily every subject has its title to favour by sympathy and by antipathy. Which of the two shall predominate? We need scarcely answer that question. The mood of mind in which the Poet sings must be genial and benign, though he may have to deal in fierce invective.

Read then, dearest Neophyte, the first Four Stanzas—recite them again, for you have them by heart. It is not easy to imagine any thing more completely at variance with all that preamble for the hymn than the hymn itself. The poet, imbued, as we have seen, with the love of nature and of man, will breathe on both his benediction. He will glorify the Sea. And how does he attain the transported and affectionate contemplation of the abyss of waters? By the opposition of man's impotence to the might of the sea; by the opposition of the land subjected to man, mixed up in his destinies, and changeable with him, to the ocean free from all change, excepting that of its own moods, the free play of its own gigantic will. For though, philosophically speaking, the immense mass of waters is in itself inert and powerless; lifted into tides by the sun and moon; lifted into storm by raging and invisible winds; yet the poet, lawfully, and by a compulsion which lies alike upon all our minds, apprehends in what is involuntary, self-willed motion, wild changeable moods, a pleasure of rolling—sun, moon, and winds, being for the moment left utterly out of thought; and it may be that Byron here does this well. But, what is the worth, what the meaning of the first Four Stanzas—in which you have delighted, because in them the Bard you love had deliberately and passionately rejected all hostile regard of man, and reclaimed for himself his place among the brotherhood—when we see that hostile regard in all its bitterness, instantaneously return and become the predominating characteristic of the whole wrathful and scornful song?

Was his previous confession of faith utterly false and hollow? If sincere and substantial, what in a moment shattered it?

This is good in temper so far—nor in aught inconsistent with the spirit pervading the introductory Stanzas; if the ten thousand fleets are presented for the magnificence of the picture. But are they? No, already for spleen. The full verse is

In vain! for what end in vain? Why for one that never was contemplated by them, nor by any rational being—that of leaving the bosom of the deep permanently furrowed by their wakes! This is a minuteness of thinking we shudder to put down—but mend the matter if you can. Try to imagine something great, if not intelligible—that the attempt which has failed was, in some titanic and mysterious way, to have established a dominion of man over the sea, to have yoked it like the earth under his hand, ploughed it, set vines and sown corn fields, and built up towered cities. But "that thought is unstable, and deserts us quite." "In vain," whatever it means, or if it means nothing—(and will no one tell us what it means?)—still proposes the sea in conflict with an adversary, and does not contemplate it for its own pure great self. The whole Hymn is founded on contrast, and therefore of indirect inspiration. To aggrandise the sea, Byron knows of no other way than to disparage the earth; and there is equally a want of truth, and of imagination and passion. If he had the capacity of worthily praising nature, if he had the genuine love and admiration for her beauty and greatness which he proudly claims, he has not shown this here; and we are induced to think that there were in his mind, faculties, intellectual and moral, stronger there than the poetical, and upon which the poetical faculty needed to stay itself—from which it needed to borrow a factitious energy—say wit and scorn, the faculties of the satirist.

"In vain," indeed! Imagination beholds ten thousand fleets sweeping over the ocean—or a hundred of them, or one—and man's exulting spirit feels that it was not in vain. The purposes for which fleets do sail—to carry commerce, to carry war, to carry colonies, to carry civilisation, to bring home knowledge, have triumphantly prospered; and, of course, are not in the meaning of the poet, although properly they alone are in the meaning of the word. But, perversely enough, the imagination of the reader accepts for an instant the pomp of the representation—"ten thousand fleets sweep over thee"—for good, as an adjunct of the ocean's magnificence; and in the confusion of thought and feeling which characterises the passage, this verse of mockery tells to the total resulting impression, in effect, like a verse of passion. The reverence which is not intended—not the contempt which is intended—for these majestic human creations, is acknowledged at last. The poet, with his living fraternal shadow beside him, is sitting upon the Italian promontory—love and wonder look through his eyes upon that sea rolling under that sky—and he speaks accordingly,—

Roll thy gentle tides on, sweet Mediterranean Sea! to beat in murmurs at my weary feet! Roll, in thine own unconfined spaces, Atlantic Ocean! with placid swell or with mounting billows, from pole to pole! Roll, circumambient World-Ocean! embracing in thy liquid arms our largest continents as thine islands, and immantling our whole globe. A fair, gentle, sedate beginning; and at the very next step—war to the knife!

The confused, unstudied impression left upon you is that of a powerful mind moving in the majesty of its power. But it is not moving in the majesty of power, after one step taken straight forwards, at the second to wheel sharply round and march off in the opposite direction. How otherwise, Homer, Pindar, Milton! They walk as kings, heroes, bards, archangels. The first canon of great, impassioned, profound writing—that the soul, filled with its theme, and with affection fitted for its theme, moves on slowly or impetuously—with a glide, or with a rush, or with a bound—but that it ever moves consistently with itself, pouring out its affection, and, in pouring it out, displaying its theme, and so evolving its work from itself in unity—is here sinned against by movements owning no law but mere caprice.

How, then, is the glorification of his subject sought here to be attained by Byron? By means of another subject shown us in hostility, and quelled. Man, in his weakness, is put in contrast and in conflict with ocean's omnipotence. Man sends out his fleets, apparently for the purpose of ruining the ocean. He cannot: he can ruin the land; but on the land's edge his deadly dominion is at an end. There the reign of a mightier and more dreadful Ruler, a greater Destroyer, a wilder Anarch, begins. The sea itself rises, wrecks the timbered vessels, drowns the crews—or at least those who fall overboard—tosses the mariner to the skies and on to shore, and swallows up fleets of war.

Such is the first movement or strain. What is the amount relatively to the purport of the poem? Why, that the first point of glorification chosen, the first utterance of enthusiastic love and admiration from the softened heart and elevated soul of a poet, who has just told us that there is such music in its roar, that by the deep sea he loves not man the less, but nature more, is, "All hail, O wrathful, dire, almighty, and remorseless destroyer!"—surely a strange ebullition of tenderness—an amatory sigh like a lion's roar—something in Polyphemus' vein—wooing with a vengeance. All this, mark ye, dear neophyte, following straight upon a proclamation of peace with all mankind—upon an Invocation to Nature for inward peace!

Grant for a moment that Man is properly to be viewed as Earth's ravager, not its cultivator, and that "his control stops with the shore," is good English in verse for "his power of desolating, or his range of desolation, is bounded by the sea-shore;" grant for a moment that it is a lawful and just practical contemplation to view him ravaging and ranging up to that edge, and to view in contrast the glad, bright, universally-laughing Ocean beyond—unravaged, unstained, unfooted, no smoke of conflagration rising, only the golden morning mist seeming all one diffused sun. Grant all this—and then what we have to complain of is, that the contrast is prepared, but not presented; and that the natural replication to "Man marks the earth with ruin," is not here. Instead of picture for picture—instead of, look on this picture and on that—we have

That is to say, peace, happiness, beauty, nowhere! Man wrecks up to the shore. There the tables are turned upon him. There the sea ravages the land, and wrecks him in return. Merciful Heaven! nothing but wrecking; as if evil spirits only possessed the universe—as if the only question to be asked any where were, Who wrecks here?

Is not this a glaring instance of a false intellectual procedure arising out of a false moral temper? The unceasing call of the Hymn is for the display of the subject extolled. And here the beautiful, or the proud superiority of the "peaceful, immeasurable plain," or of the indignant, independent, thundrous sea, was imperiously suggested for some moments surely, if the Poem be one of glorification. But no! We may imagine for ourselves, if we please, the beauty, splendour, joy, tempestuous liberty of the unfettered waters; but the love of the ocean is not in the Poet's mind, as it ought to have been—only the hate of man.

As it ought to have been? Yea, verily. Had he not taken the pledge? To drink but of the purest spring of inspiration—the Fount of Love. And may he, without reproach, break it when he chooses, and we not dare to condemn? Of all promises, the promise made by poet of world-wide fame before the wide world, in his soul's best mood, and in nature's noblest inspiration, is the most sacred—to break it is a sin, and a sin that brings its appropriate punishment along with it,—loss or abeyance of the faculty divine. Byron had sworn to love man and nature, and to glorify their works, on the very instant he seeks to degrade and vilify. We listen to a religious overture—to the Devil's March. We are invited to enter with him a temple of worship—and praise and prayer become imprecations and curses. It is as if a hermit, telling his beads at the door of his cell, retired into its interior to hold converse with a blaspheming spirit. Fear not to call it by its right name—this is Hypocrisy.

So much as to the fitness of the mood; now as to the truth of the matter.

What is, justly considered, the relation of man to the sea? Is it here truly spoken? Certainly not. The Facts and the Songs of the world are all the other way. In history, the ocean is the giant slave of the magician Man—with some difficulty brought under thraldom—humorous, and not always manageable—mischievous when he gets his own way. But compare statistically the service and the detriment, for Clio must instruct Calliope and Erato. Passion that cannot sustain itself but by hiding that which has been, and accrediting that which has not been, is personal, not poetical—is mad, not inspired. The truth is, that the Ship is the glory of man's inventive art and inventive daring—the most splendid triumph of heroical art. And—for the history of man—the service of the sea to his ship has been the civilising of the earth. The wrecks are occasional—so much so that, in our ordinary estimate, they are forgotten. It would be as good poetry to say that all the inhabitants of the land live by wrecking.

In this first movement or strain, then, two great relations upheld by man are put in question,—his relation to the land, and his relation to the sea. The Basis of Song to the true and great poet is the truth of things—the truth as the historian and the philosopher know them. Over this he throws his own affection and creates a truth of his own—a poetical truth. But the truth, as held in man's actual knowledge, is recognisable through the transparent veil. Here it is distorted, not veiled. The two relations are alike falsified. For in order to bring man into conflict with the sea, where he and not the sea is to be worsted, he must first be made the foe of the earth! "Man marks the earth with ruin." Is this the history of man on the earth? Man has vanquished the Earth, but for its benefit as well as his own. He has displaced the forest and the swamp, the wild beast and the serpent. He has adorned the earth like a bride; as if he had made captive a wild Amazon, charmed her with Orphean arts, wedded and made her a happy mother of many children. Whatever impressive effect such verses may have on the inconsiderate mind, it has been illegitimately attained by a preposterous and utterly unprovoked movement of tempestuous passion, and by two utterly false contemplations of man's posture upon the globe, which two embrace about his whole mortal existence. Eloquence might condescend to this—poetry never.

Note well, O Neophyte! that the calm, contemplative, loving first line,

precludes all comparison with such sudden bursts as "Ruin seize thee, ruthless king!" &c., and "Quousque tandem abutÊre, Catilina," &c.; but it does not preclude, it invites the killing comparison with

Where the speaker is fraught with personal, not as a poet with impersonal affection—where he comes charged with hate, not with love; and yet how slowly, how sedately, through how many thoughts, how much admiration, and how many verses, he reaches his hate at last, which is his object! But on that soliloquy, dear Neophyte, we must discourse another day.

We must go a little—not very much—into particulars; for otherwise, O Neophyte! believe thou, whatever wiseacres say, there can be no true criticism of poetry. Let us—and that which might have been expected will appear,—a detail of moral and intellectual disorder. The stanza of which we have been speaking begins well—as we have seen and said. Thenceforth all is stamped with incongruity, and shows an effect like power, by violently bringing together, in a most remarkable manner, things that cannot consist—by the transition from the Universal to the Individual, when for

which shows us a thousand ships foundering in mid ocean, and the earth's shores all strewn with fragments of oak-leviathans, we have instantaneously substituted, as if this were the same thing,

What has happened? What is meant? Is this literally the representation of some single human being actually dropping, as unfortunately happens from time to time, from a ship's side into the immensity of waters? And is this horrible game and triumph of Ocean, which threatened to annihilate the species, upon a sudden confined to "a man overboard?" Or are we to understand that, by a strong feat of uncreating and recreating imagination, this one man, dropped as if naked from the clouds into the sea and submerged, impersonates and impictures, by some concentration of human agony and of human impotence, that universally diffused annihilation of Man in his ships which was the matter in hand? We do not believe that any reader can give a satisfactory explanation or account of the course of thinking that has been here pursued. Upon the face of the words lies that natural pathos which belongs to the perishing of the individual, which serves to blind inquiry, and stands as a substitute for any reasonable thinking at all; and thus a grammatical confusion between Man and a man makes the whole absolute nonsense.

Then look here:—

This is not only not true—it is false. If man, clothed in the thunder of war, is able to strew ruin upon the land, he, militant, by the same power, strews wreck and ruin upon the waters; and so the distinction pretended, whatever it might be worth, fails. And does not the swallowing of the unknelled and uncoffined, which is attributed to the sea as the victor of man, take place as effectually when beak or broadside sends down a ship with her hundreds of souls, when the great sea, willing or unwilling, appears merely as the servile minister of insulting man's hate and fury?

"Rule Britannia" rings in our ears, and gives that assertion the lie. Does Macaulay's Ode idly recount an ineffectual muster? Did the Lord High Admiral of England, with all his commodores and captains, do nothing to the Armada? With what face dared an English Poet say to the sea that on all those days "the wrecks were all thy deed?" The storms were England's allies indeed, from Cape Clear to the Orcades. But only her allies; and, much as we respect the storms and their services, we say to the English fleet, "The wrecks were all thy deed." At Trafalgar the storms finally sided with the Spaniards. "Let the fleet be anchored," said Nelson ere he died; and, had that been possible, it had been done by Collingwood. After the fight Gravina came out to the rescue—but the sea engulfed the spoils. Yet, spite of that, we say again to the English fleet, "The wrecks were all thy deed;" and the sea answers—and will answer to all eternity—"Ay, ay, ay!"

Byron, we verily believe, was the first Great Poet that owned not a patriot's heart. No pride ever had he in his Country's triumphs either on land or sea. It seems as if he were impatient of every national and individual greatness that, however far aloof from his sphere, might eclipse his own. He has written well—but not so well as he ought to have done—of Waterloo. The glory of Wellington overshadowed him; and, by keeping his name out of his verses, he would keep the hero himself out of sight. But there he is resplendent in spite of the Poet's spleen. Verbum non amplius for Trafalgar! not one for Nelson. Not so did Cowper—the pious, peace-loving Cowper—regard his country's conflicts. At thought of these the holy Harper's soul awoke. He too sung of the sea:—

That is majestic—and this is sublime:—

Ay, then, indeed, "ten thousand fleets sail over Thee in vain." Had Byron Cowper's great line in his mind? The copy cannot stand comparison with the original.

If we will try the poet by his words, and know whether he has mastered the consummation of his art by "writing well," we may cull from several instances of suspicious language, in this stanza, the following—

What is the meaning—the translation? "There is not on the ocean to be found a shadow of ravage in which man is the agent. The only ravage known on the ocean, in which man is concerned, is that which he suffers from the ocean." This, if false, is nevertheless an intelligible proposition. But "ravage" is a strange word—a shocking bad one—applied, as you presently find that it must be, to one drowning man being "ravaged" by being drowned; and even more strange still is the grammatical opposition of "his ravage," as properly signifying, the ravage which he achieves, to "his own ravage" as properly signifying the ravage which he endures!

Moreover, what is meant by "remain"? Properly, to linger for a moment ere disappearing. But the proposition is, that ruin effected by man has no place at all on the waters. The poet means, that as long as you, the contemplator, tread the land, you walk among ruins made by man. When you pass on to the sea, no shadow of such ruin any longer accompanies you,—that is, any longer remains with you.

One great fault of style which the Hymn shows is Equivocation. The words are equivocal. Hence the contradiction—as in this stanza especially—between what is promised and what is done. Weigh for a moment these lines—

&c., and tell us what they seem to describe. You will find yourself in a pretty puzzle. A ship? a fleet? myriads of ships lost? or one drowning man? Surely one drowning man. His own phrase,

here pre-appears. But he had bound himself quite otherwise. By his pledge he should, in contrast with man's wreck active upon shore, have given man's wreck passive upon the flood,—the earth strewn with ruin by man's hand, the sea strewn with ruin of man himself,—magnis excidit ausis.

The words "remain" and "man" have played the part here of juggling fiends,—

For lend us your ear for a few minutes. The word "remain" is originally and essentially a word of time, and means to "continue" in some assigned condition through a certain duration of time; as, for example, he "remained in command for a year." In this clause of Byron's, it has become essentially a word that has regard to space without regard to time. To see that it is so, you must begin with possessing the picture that has been set before you, and which is here the basis and outset of the thinking. This picture is—"man marks the earth with ruin." Realise the picture at the height of the words without flinching. For example, from the Atlantic eastward to the Pacific, man ravages. Here Napoleon—a little farther on Mahomet the Second—farther, the Crusaders—beyond these Khuli Khan or Timour Leng—lastly, the Mogul conquerors of the Celestial Empire,—a chain of desolation from Estremadura to Corea. Had land extended around the globe, it had been a belt of desolation encircling the globe. Corn fields, vineyards, trampled under foot of man and horse,—villages, towns, and great cities, reeking with conflagration, like the smoke ascending from some enormous altar of abomination to offend the nostrils of heaven—armed hosts lying trampled in their blood—the unarmed lying scattered every where in theirs; for man has trodden the earth in his rage, and before him was as the garden of Eden, behind him is the desolate wilderness. This is a translation of the hemistich,—"Man marks the earth with ruin,"—into prose. It is a faithful, a literal translation—Byron meant as much: and you, neophyte, in an instantaneous image receive as much—perhaps with more faith or persuasion, because leaden-pacing, tardy-gaited exposition goes against such faith; but some belief will remain if we, who have put ourselves in the place of the poet, have used colours that seize upon your imagination.

Well, then, if your imagination has done that which the summary word-picture of the poet required of you, you have swept the earth, or one of its continents, with instantaneous flight from shore to shore, and seen this horrible devastation—this widely-spread ravage. You have not staid your wing at the shore, but have swept on, driven by your horror, till you have hung, and first breathed at ease, over the Mid Pacific, over the wide OCEAN OF PEACE—over the unpolluted, everlasting ocean, murmuring under your feet—the unpolluted, everlasting heavens over your head. Here is no ravage of man's: no! nor the shadow of it—

But how "nor doth remain?" The ravage has gone along with you from sea-marge to sea-marge. At sea it is no longer with you. Traversing the land it remained your companion. It remained the continual and loathed object of your eyes. Now no shadow of it is to be seen—it haunts your flight no longer. No shadow of it any longer accompanies your aerial voyage—any longer stays, abides, remains with you. If the word has not this meaning, it has no meaning here in this clause. In this clause it cannot mean this—"upon the ocean, the ravage made by man appears like a flash of lightning, seen and gone,—upon the ocean this ravage, or some shadow of this ravage, has a momentary duration, but no more than momentary, no abiding, no remaining." This cannot be the meaning, since of man it has been expressly said 'his control stops with the shore'—that is, ends there, is not on the ocean at all. Manifestly the question at issue is, not whether destruction effected by man lasts upon the waters, but whether it is at all upon the waters; and Byron's decision is plainly that it is not at all. For he has already said "upon the watery plain the wrecks are all thy deed." That is to say, any sort of wreck effected by man upon the flood at all has been twice rejected in express words; and this word "remain" must imperatively be understood consonantly to this rejection.

Byron, then, we see, in denying that wrecks made by man "remain" upon the "watery plain," takes a word which properly sets before you an extending in time, and uses it for setting before you an extending in space. The ravage of which man is the agent does not extend over the "watery plain"—no, not a shadow of it.

But pray attend to this—no sooner does the sequent clause "save his own," take its place in the verse, than the word "remain" shifts its meaning back, from the signification accidentally forced upon it as has been explained, and reverts to its original and wonted power as a word of time! The force of the united clauses now stands thus—"upon the water there cannot be found a trace of the ruin executed by man. But of the ruin suffered by him there is an apparition, a vestige, a shadow, a vanishing display, namely—

He plunges, and all is over. The "bubbling groan" is the momentarily remaining notice of his extinction.

Now this first equivocation has an immediate moral consequence—namely, a reaction upon the feelings of the poet. "Remain," as an "extending in space," acts upon the imagination expansively here, if it were suffered to act—and if room were given it to act upon the imagination—inasmuch as "nor doth remain," as a word of extending in space, marks or helps to mark out the two great regions into which his lordship divides the terraqueous globe—ravaged land and unravaged water. But "remain," as an "extending in time," acts here contractively; and "nor remain" means now "does not outlive the moment!" and in this manner an entirely new direction or tenor is given to thought and feeling—for the zeal of diminishing seizes on the imagination of the writer. He is led to making man insignificant by the momentariness of his perishing! He has contracted, by power of scorn, and by the trick of a word, the seventy years of man into an instant. That is one diminution, and another follows upon it. The Fleets, wrecked whenever they fight against the water, vanish from his fancy, as in the shifting of a dream; and he sees, amidst the troubled world of waters—one man perishing! One mode of insignificancy admitted, induces another. With the shrinking of time to a moment goes along, the shrinking of multitude to one!

The same double-dealing takes place with the word "Man." Man signifies the individual human being—or the race. "Of man's first disobedience"—mankind's. "Man marks the earth with ruin"—mankind does so. "Nor doth remain a shadow of man's ravage"—of mankind's ravage. "When for a moment, like a drop of rain, he sinks into thy waves "—that is now the single sailor, whom a roll of the ship has hurled from the topmast into the waters; or, when the ship has gone down, some strong swimmer who has fought in vain upon the waters, and, spent in limb and heart, sinks. And thus the reader, after stumbling for two or three steps in darkness and perplexity, within a moment of having left mankind in the annihilating embrace of Ocean, upon a sudden finds himself set face to face with one man, we shall suppose "The last man," drowning!

In the Stanza now commented on, there was a struggle depicted, a question proposed between Man and the Ocean—which shall be the Wrecker? The Ocean prevails; Man is wrecked. In the succeeding Stanza there is, it would seem, another question moved between the same disputants. No, it is the same. Let us examine well. A moment before, Man appeared as treading the earth as a Destroyer, his proud step stayed at high water-mark. Now he appears upon the earth as a traveller and a reaper—by implication or allusion—by the figure of "not."

He walks and reaps the earth; he does not walk and reap the ocean. This is plainly the process of the "worthy cogitation;" and unquestionably the assertion is true—true to the letter, but only to the letter. For, standing on Mount Albano, or on the Land's End, or here sitting beneath the porch of our Marine Villa fronting the Firth of Forth, we are poets every one of us, and we will venture beyond the letter;—

—reply—chaunter of Man's Hope, and of England's Power,—

There is a dash of sea-craft for you; and, "cheered by the grateful sound, for many a league old ocean smiles."

And for the sickle! What! must the net and the harpoon go for nothing? No harvests on the barren flood! What else are pearl-fisheries, herring-fisheries, cod-fisheries, and whale-fisheries? "The sea! The deep, deep sea!" Why, the sea cannot keep its own; cannot defend the least or the mightiest of its nurselings from the hand of the gigantic plunderer Man.

The fields of earth are not. For he ploughed and sowed ere he reaped, and earned back his own. But on thy fields, no ploughing, no sowing—all reaping! Sheer spoil. Poor, helpless, tributary, rifled, ravaged Ocean!

Then follows a very eminent instance of the fault which has been urged as radical in these Stanzas—forced, unnatural, wilful, or false sequence of thought; a deliberate intention in the mind of the writer, taking the place of the spontaneous free suggestion proper to poetry. We have had man trying to produce ruin on the ocean, and wrecked, swallowed up. Now, man tries to walk and reap the ocean. The poet has outraged mother earth, and her vengeance is upon him. He has wrongfully and wilfully brought in the Earth, for its old alliance with man to hear hard words; and he suffers the penalty. Cease, rude Boreas, blustering railer, for you are out of breath. Mere mouthing is not command of words; the sound we hear now is but the echo of the last stanza, and the angry Childe is unwittingly repeating himself,—

Here is again the contest, again the ruining upon earth,—nay, he destroys the earth itself—again the wrecking of the ship. Surely there is great awkwardness in stepping on from the proof of man's impotence in the sinking of his ship, to the proof of man's impotence in the sinking of his ship. "Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies" may be a vigorous verse, though we doubt it; but if the ship outlive the storm, which many a ship has done many a thousand times, it can be turned against the ocean, who has done his worst in vain. What is man's "petty hope?" and what means "again to earth?" Is it again from the skies—or back to the earth from which he embarked? Not one expression is precise; and so, with some scorn of man's old ally, who now so roughly receives him,—"there let him lay!" There is something very horrible indeed in insulting a dead man in the Cockney dialect.

In all this there is no dignity, no grandeur; Byron does not well to be angry—it is seldom that any man or poet does—for, though anger is a "short madness," it is not a "fine frenzy." Such Te Deum true Poetry never yet sang, for true Poetry never yet was blasphemous—never yet derided Man's Dread or Man's Hope, when sinking in multitudes in the sea, which God holds in the hollow of his hand.

Go on to the next Stanza—

Why, here is another shipwreck—only now a fleet of war—before, one merchant-ship perhaps. The Earth, too, is again implicated, and we have the same scornful antithesis of Earth and Ocean. Earth with her towery diadem—Earth, the nurse of nations, trembles at the approach of armaments, which the ocean devours like melting snow. There has been, then, a certain progression in the three stanzas. A drowning man—a merchant-ship tossed and stranded—an armada scattered and lost. Three striking subjects of poetical delineation, each strikingly shown with some true touches, mixed with much false writing. One may understand that in consequence from out the whirlwind and chaos of the composition, resembling the tumult of the sea, there will remain to the reader who does not sift the writing an impression of power—of some great thing done—of Man and his Earth humbled, and the Ocean exalted. In the mean time, the way of the thoughts, the course of the mind, by which this ascent or climax is obtained, is extremely hard to trace, if traceable. The critic may extricate such an order from the disorder: but observe, that the ascent or climax can be attained only by neglecting certain strong indications that go another way. Thus, in the first stanza—

includes all that is or can be said more of ship or fleet. Again, in the next stanza—

Here is again said all that is possible to be said. "Thou dost arise and shake him from thee" being perhaps the strongest expression obtained at all; and the "vile strength" being precisely the Armadas described immediately afterwards with so much pomp and pride. Thus there is really confusion and oscillation of thought—mixed with a progress a standing still—and this characteristic of much of Byron's poetry comes prominently out—Uncertainty. Impulses and leaps of a powerful spirit are here; but self-knowing Power, a mind master of its purposes, disciplined genius, Art accomplished by studies profound and severe, lawful Emulation of the great names that shine in the authentic rolls of immortal Fame, the sanctioned inspiration which the pleased Muses deign to their devout followers, are not here.

The strength of Man, proved in contest with Ocean and found weakness, is disposed of. The Earth, as bound up with Man and his destinies, came in for a share of rough usage. Now she takes her own turn—in connexion with Man, but now principal. Here the pride of the words is great—the meaning sometimes almost or quite inextricable. Recite the Stanza, beginning

and when the sonorous roll has subsided, try to understand it. You will find some difficulty, if we mistake not, in knowing who or what is the apostrophised subject. Unquestionably the World's Ocean, and not the Mediterranean. The very last verse we were afar in the Atlantic. "Thy shores are empires." The shores of the World's Ocean are Empires. There are, or have been, the British Empire, the German Empire, the Russian Empire, and the Empire of the Great Mogul—the Chinese Empire, the Empire of Morocco, those of Peru and Mexico, the Four Great Empires of Antiquity, the French Empire, and some others. The Poet does not intend names and things in this very strict way, however, and he will take in all great Monarchies, nor will he grudge us the imagining the whole Earth laid out in imperial dominions.

Well then—we again, dear Neophyte, bid you try to understand the Stanza, and tell us what it means. What rational thought is there here? With what propriety do we consider the whole Earth as the shores of the Ocean—when shore is exactly the interlimitation of land and sea? Is this a lawful way of celebrating the Ocean, to throw in the whole of the lately despised Earth as its brilliant appendage? The question rises, how far from the shore does the shore extend—and whether inwards or outwards?

But there is a meaning and a good one in a way. ???st?? e? ?d??. The water civilises the land. 'Tis an old remark—but how? By ships. Here, then, are the tables turned. Lately the sea did nothing with ships but destroy them. Now it patiently wafts them, and by commerce and colonies the Sea civilises the Globe! Surely this is poetical injustice. The first glory of the Sea was, that Man could not sail upon its bosom. The second glory of the Sea is, that, by offering its bosom to be furrowed by Man's daring and indefatigable keels, it—ministerially then—civilises the World. The Sea is the civiliser of the Land—Man is—the Destroyer merely.

Pray, what is the meaning of saying that the Roman and the Assyrian Empires are shores of the Sea: and changed, excepting that the same waters wash the same strands? The deep inland Empires recede too much from the sea-shore to allow any hold to the relation proposed in the words, "changed in all save thee." We know the Sea as their limit—an accident, rather than as a part of their being. The meeting of sea and land being the limit of an empire, the limit remains whilst the Imperial State has withered from the land. Does the immobility of the limit belong more to one element than to the other? And is the Roman Empire, O Neophyte, more unchanged in the Mediterranean and Atlantic than it is in the Apennines, and Alps, and Pyrenees, and Helvellyn?

Every clause that regards Earth is, in one way or in another, intolerable—small or tortured. "Thy waters wasted them while they were free," means either "swallowed up their ships, or—ate away their edges!" Alas! that most unhappy meaning is the true one—and what a cogitation to come into a man's—an inspired Poet's head! "Thy waters fretted away the maritime littoral edges of the Assyrian, the Grecian, the Roman, the Carthaginian Empires, whilst those Empires flourished!" And this interesting piece of geographical, and geological, and hydrographical meditation makes part in a burst of indignant spleen which is to go near to annihilating Man from the face of the Globe! Was it possible to express more significantly the imbecility of Old Ocean? And has he not been fretting ever since? And are not the limits the same, as we were told a minute ago? Old Ocean must be in his dotage if he can do no more than that—and we must elect him perpetual President of the Fogie Club.

Such wretched writing shows, with serious warning, how a false temper, admitted into poetry, overrules the sound intellect into gravely and weightily entertaining combinations of thought which, looked at either with common sense or with poetical feeling, cannot be sustained for a moment. How many of Lord Byron's admirers believe—and, in spite of Christopher, will continue to believe—that in these almost senseless stanzas he has said something strong, poignant, cutting, of good edge, and "full of force driven home!"

We accept the image; let us grant that the Personification is a fine one. Nevertheless it does not entirely satisfy the imagination. And why? Because the thought of the azure brow, on which time writes no wrinkles, suggests for a moment the thought of the white brow—the brow of man or woman—the human brow, on which Time does write wrinkles along with the engraver, Sorrow. For a moment! but that is not the intended pathos—and it fades away. The intended pathos here belongs to the wrinkles Time writes on the brow of the Earth—while it spares that of the Sea. But Time deals not so with our gracious Mother Earth. Time keeps perpetually beautifying her brow, while it leaves the brow of Ocean the same as it was at Creation's Dawn. How far more beautiful has the DÆdal Earth been growing, from century to century, over Continent and Isle, under the love of her grateful children! The Curse has become a Blessing. In the sweat of their brow they eat their bread; but Nature's self, made lovelier by their labour of heart and hand, rejoices in their creative happiness, and troubled life prepares rest from its toil in many a pleasant place fair as the bowers of Paradise.

We approach the next Stanza reverently, for it has a religious look—an aspect "that threatens the profane."

Suitably recited! let it be suitably spoken of—fearlessly, in truth. The vituperating spirit has exhausted itself—is dead; and all at once the Poet becomes a worshipper. From cherished exasperation with the Creature—from varying moods of hate and scorn—he turns to contemplation of the Creator. Such transition is suspicious—can such worship be sincere? Fallen, sinful—yet is man God's noblest work. In His own image did He create him; and to glorify Him must we vilify the dust into which He breathed a living soul? Let the Poet lament, with thoughts that lie too deep for tears, over what Man has made of Man! And in the multitude of thoughts within him adore his Maker—in words. But he who despises his kind, and delights, in heaping contumely on the race of man throughout all his history on earth and sea—how may he, when wearied with chiding, all at once, as if it had been not hindrance but preparation, dare to speak, in the language of worship, of the Almighty Maker of Heaven and of Earth?

The Stanza, accordingly, is not good—it is laboured, heavy, formal, uninspired by divine afflatus. There is not in it one truly sublime expression. Nothing to our mind can be worse than "where the Almighty's Form glasses itself &c.—" The one word "Form" is destructive, in its gross materialism, alike of natural Poetry and natural Religion. If it be not, show us we are wrong, and henceforth we shall be mute for ever. "In all time, calm or convulsed, in breeze, or gale, or storm," is poor and prosaic; and "or storm," a pitiable platitude after "in tempests." And the conversion of a Mirror into a Throne—of the Mirror too in which the Almighty's "Form glasses itself," into the Throne of the "Invisible"—is a fatal contradiction, proving the utter want of that possession of soul by one awful thought which was here demanded, and without which the whole stanza becomes but a mere collocation and hubbub of big-sounding words. "Even from out thy slime, the monsters of the deep are made," is violently jammed in between lines that have no sort of connexion with it, and introduces a thought which, whether consistent with true Philosophy or abhorrent from it, breaks in upon the whole course of contemplation, such as it is,—to say nothing of the extreme poverty of language shown in the use of such words as "monsters of the deep" made out of the slime of the sea.

The strain—such as it is—ceases suddenly with this Stanza; and the Poet having thus got done with it, exclaiming "and I have loved thee, Ocean," proceeds forthwith to a different matter altogether—to the pleasure he was wont to enjoy, when a boy, in swimming among the breakers. The verses are in themselves very spirited; but we must think—and hope so do you—very much out of place, and a sad descent from the altitude attempted, and believed by the Poet himself to have been attained, in the preceding Stanza about the Almighty.

Why, listening Neophyte, recite both Stanzas, and then tell us whether or no you think they maybe improved by being put into—our Prose. We do not seek thereby to injure what Poetry may be in them, but to bring it out and improve it.

"Thou glorious Mirror, in which, when black with tempests, Fancy might conceive Omnipotence imaged in visible reflection!—Thou Sea, that in all thy seasons, whether smooth or agitated, whether soft or wild wind blow, in all thy regions, icy at the Pole, dark-heaving at the Equator, ever and every where callest forth our acknowledgment that Thou art illimitable, interminable, sublime; that Thou art the symbol of Eternity—(like a circle by returning into itself;) that Thou art the visible Throne of the Invisible Deity—Thou whose very dregs turn into enormous life—Thou who, possessing the larger part of every zone, art thus a King in every zone; Thou takest thy course around the Earth,—great by thine awfulness, by thine undiscoverable depth, by thy solitude!

"And I, thy Poet, was of old thy Lover! In young years my favourite disport was to lie afloat on thy bosom, carried along by Thee, passive, resigned to Thy power, one of Thy bubbles. A boy, Thy waves were my playmates, or my playthings. If, as the wind freshened, and they swelled, I grew afraid, there was a pleasure even in the palpitation of the fears, for I lived with Thee and loved Thee, even like a child of Thine, and believed that Thy billows would not hurt me, and laid my hand boldly and wantonly on their crests—as at this instant I do, here sitting upon the Alban Mount—and making (as they say) a long arm."

Ha! The Dinner-Gong!