degraded and miserable, and his fellow men as creatures with whom he was unwilling to be ranked, he excluded from his poetry all the infinite variety of thoughts and feelings, which belong to the higher part of our nature. He did not recognise those great truths, with which all just sentiments are connected. In his mind, the source of intellectual day was darkened, and he perceived not the beautiful colouring, and the ever varying lights and shadows, which it spreads over the objects of thought and imagination. scepticism of a depraved heart is not inconsistent with the vehement expression of strong passions, or of deep gloom; but it is inconsistent with all generous and invigorating purposes and sentiments, and with all those emotions, which are most sublime and ennobling. The poetry of Byron is the

The

poetry of earth only; where it is

his Cain, the poetry of hell.

not, as in

His mind,

strongly acted upon by a few objects, reacted strongly upon them. But the sphere within which his intellect exerted itself was narrow. Scarcely any writer has so much of what is essentially repetition. Every one begins to grow weary at last of being told of his misanthropy and his misery, his passions and his pride, the worthlessness of man and the worthlessness of life.

From the causes which have been mentioned, there is often a striking contrast between the grandeur of Byron's conceptions, and the poverty and deadness of the sentiment, with which they are connected. The latter resembles some worthless corpse, lying in state, surrounded by the insignia of nobility, and with banners hanging over it.

Let us take, for example, one of his most

striking passages.

Oh Rome! my country! city of the soul!
The orphans of the heart must turn to thee,
Lone mother of dead empires! and control
In their shut breasts their petty misery.
What are our woes and sufferance! Come and see
The cypress, hear the owl, and plod your way
O'er steps of broken thrones and temples. Ye!
Whose agonies are evils of a day-

A world is at our feet as fragile as our clay.

The Niobe of nations! there she stands,
Childless and crownless, in her voiceless wo;
An empty urn within her wither'd hands,
Whose holy dust was scatter'd long ago;
The Scipios' tomb contains no ashes now;
The very sepulchres lie tenantless

Of their heroic dwellers; dost thou flow,
Old Tiber! through a marble wilderness?
Rise, with thy yellow waves, and mantle her distress.

There is nothing in poetry more colossal and imposing, than some of the expressions

in this passage--" Lone mother of dead

empires"

The Niobe of nations! there she stands,
Childless and crownless.

In what follows, images of desolated greatness are brought before us with powerful effect

The Scipios' tomb contains no ashes now;
The very sepulchres lie tenantless

Of their heroic dwellers; dost thou flow,
Old Tiber! through a marble wilderness?

What, then, is the defect of this passage? We answer, the unnatural and false sentiment, which is arrayed with all this magnificence. Rome is personified, and represented as standing overwhelmed with her voiceless wo; and we are called upon, in contemplating the misery felt by this personification, to

repress the expression of our own sufferings. The figure itself is carried too far, and its effect weakened, when the imagination of distress is distinctly introduced. But the thought becomes altogether incongruous, when this imaginary distress is applied to the moral purpose of enforcing patience upon those, whose agonies are represented as nothing in comparison, being but the evils of a day. Strong sympathy, even with the real sufferings of those who have lived during past ages, is not the feeling, which a contemplation of the ruins of human glory is naturally adapted to produce. With the false sentiment, which runs through the passage, is connected the tame extravagance of the concluding apostrophe to the Tiber—

Rise with thy yellow waves, and mantle her distress.