Hard is his fate on whom the public gaze
Is fix'd forever to detract or praise;
Repose denies her requiem to his name,
And Folly loves the martyrdom of Fame.
The secret enemy whose sleepless eye
Stands sentinel-accuser-judge-and spy,
The foe the fool-the jealous--and the vain,
The envious who but breathe in others' pain,
Behold the host! delighting to deprave,
Who track the steps of Glory to the grave,
Watch every fault that daring Genius owes
Half to the ardor which its birth bestows,
Distort the truth, accumulate the lie,
And pile the pyramid of Calumny!
These are his portion-but if join'd to these
Gaunt Poverty should league with deep Disease,
If the high Spirit must forget to soar,
And stoop to strive with Misery at the door,'
To soothe Indignity-and face to face
Meet sordid Rage-and wrestle with Disgrace,
To find in Hope but the renew'd caress,
The serpent-fold of further Faithlessness:--
If such may be the ills which men assail,
What marvel if at last the mightiest fail?
Breasts to whom all the strength of feeling given
Bear hearts electric-charged with fire from Heaven,
Black with the rude collision, inly torn,

By clouds surrounded, and on whirlwinds borne,

Driven o'er the lowering atmosphere that nursed Thoughts which have turn'd to thunder-scorchand burst.2

But far from us and from our mimic scene
Such things should be-if such have ever been;
Ours be the gentler wish, the kinder task,
To give the tribute Glory need not ask,
To mourn the vanish'd beam-and add our mite
Of praise in payment of a long delight.
Ye Orators! whom yet our councils yield,
Mourn for the veteran Hero of your field!
The worthy rival of the wondrous Three !
Whose words were sparks of Immortality!
Ye Bards! to whom the Drama's Muse is dear,
He was your Master-emulate him here!
Ye men of wit and social eloquence !
He was your brother-bear his ashes hence!
While Powers of mind almost of boundless range,
Complete in kind-as various in their change,
While Eloquence-Wit-Poesy--and Mirth,
That humbler Harmonist of care on Earth,
Survive within our souls-while lives our sense
Of pride in Merit's proud pre-eminence,
Long shall we seek his likeness-long in vain,
And turn to all of him which may remain,
Sighing that Nature form'd but one such man,
And broke the die-in moulding Sheridan.

Diodati, July 17, 1816.

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 development have breath, And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy; They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts, They take a weight from off our waking toils,

1 [This was not fiction. Only a few days before his death, Sheridan wrote thus to Mr. Rogers:-"I am absolutely undone and broken-hearted. They are going to put the carpets out of window, and break into Mrs. S.'s room and take me: 1501. will remove all difficulty. For God's sake let me see you!" Mr. Moore was the immediate bearer of the required sum. This was written on the 15th of May. On the 14th of July, Sheridan's remains were deposited in Westminster Abbey, his pall-bearers being the Duke of Bedford, the Earl of Lauderdale, Earl Mulgrave, the Lord Bishop of London, Lord Holland, and Earl Spencer.]

["Abandon'd by the skies, whose beams have nursed Their very thunders, lighten-scorch--and burst."

MS.]

3 Fox-Pitt-Burke. ["When Fox was asked, which he thought the best speech he had ever heard, he replied, Sheridan's on the impeachment of Hastings in the House of Commons. When he made it, Fox advised him to speak it over again in Westminster Hall on the trial, as nothing better could be made of the subject: but Sheridan made his new speech as different as possible, and, according to the best judges, very inferior, notwithstanding the panegyric of Burke, who exclaimed during the delivery of some passages of it-There, that is the true style-something between poetry and prose, and better than either.'"-Byron Diary, (from Lord Holland,) 1821.]

4["In society I have met Sheridan frequently. He was superb! I have seen him cut up Whitbread, quiz Madame de Staël, annihilate Colman, and do little less by some others of good fame and ability. I have met him at all

They do divide our being they become
A portion of ourselves as of our time,
And look like heralds of eternity;
They pass like spirits of the past,--they speak
Like sibyls of the future; they have power--
The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;
They make us what we were not-what they will,
And shake us with the vision that's gone by,
The dread of vanish'd shadows-Are they so?

places and parties-at Whitehall with the Melbournes, at the Marquis of Tavistock's, at Robins's the auctioneers, st Sir Humphry Davy's, at Sam Rogers's-in short, in most kinds of company, and always found him convivial and delightful."-Byron Diary, 1821.1

["Lord Holland told me a curious piece of sentimentality in Sheridan. The other night we were all delivering our respective and various opinions upon him and other komme marquans, and mine was thisWhatever Sheridan has done or chosen to do has been par excellence always the best of its kind. He has written the best Comedy, (School for Scandal,) the best drama (in my mind, far beyond that St. Giles's lampoon, the Beggars' Opera,) the best farce, (the Critic-it is only too good for a farce,) and the best address. (Monologue on Garrick,) and, to crown all, delivered the very best oration (the famous Begum speech) ever conceived or heard in this country. Somebody told Sheridan this the next day, and, on hearing it, he burst into tears Poor Brinsley! if they were tears of pleasure, I would rather have said these few, but most sincere, words, than nave written the Iliad, or made his own celebrated philippic. Nay, his own comedy never gratified me more than to hear that he had derived a moment's gratification from any praise of mine."-Byron Diary, Dec. 17, 1813.1

[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 characterizes it as "the most mournful, as well as picturesque story of a wandering life' that ever came from the pen and heart of man." It was composed at Diodati, in July, 1816.]

V.

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
The Lady of his love was wed with One
Who did not love her better:-in her home,
A thousand leagues from his,-her native home,
She dwelt, begirt with growing Infancy,
Daughters and sons of Beauty,--but behold!
Upon her face there was the tint of grief,
The settled shadow of an inward strife,
And an unquiet drooping of the eye,

As if its lid were charged with unshed tears.
What could her grief be?-she had all she loved,
And he who had so loved her was not there
To trouble with bad hopes, or evil wish,
Or ill-repress'd affliction, her pure thoughts.
What could her grief be?-she had loved him not,
Nor given him cause to deem himself beloved,
Nor could he be a part of that which prey'd
Upon her mind-a spectre of the past.

VI.

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
The Wanderer was return'd.-I saw him stand
Before an Altar-with a gentle bride;
Her face was fair, but was not that which made
The Starlight of his Boyhood;-as he stood
Even at the altar, o'er his brow there came
The selfsame aspect, and the quivering shock
That in the antique Oratory shook
His bosom in its solitude; and then-
As in that hour-a moment o'er his face
The tablet of unutterable thoughts
Was traced-and then it faded as it came,
And he stood calm and quiet, and he spoke
The fitting vows, but heard not his own words,
And all things reel'd around him; he could see
Not that which was, nor that which should have been-
But the old mansion, and the accustom'd hall,
And the remember'd chambers, and the place,
The day, the hour, the sunshine, and the shade,
All things pertaining to that place and hour,
And her who was his destiny, came back
And thrust themselves between him and the light:
What business had they there at such a time?

VII.

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
The Lady of his love;-Oh! she was changed,
As by the sickness of the soul; her mind
Had wander'd from its dwelling, and her eyes,
They had not their own lustre, but the look
Which is not of the earth; she was become
The queen of a fantastic realm; her thoughts
Were combinations of disjointed things;
And forms impalpable and unperceived
Of others' sight familiar were to hers.
And this the world calls phrensy; but the wise
Have a far deeper madness, and the glance
Of melancholy is a fearful gift;
What is it but the telescope of truth?
Which strips the distance of its fantasies,
And brings life near in utter nakedness,
Making the cold reality too real!"

VIII.

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
The Wanderer was alone as heretofore,
The beings which surrounded him were gone,
Or were at war with him; he was a mark
For blight and desolation, compass'd round
With Hatred and Contention; Pain was mix'd
In all which was served up to him, until,
Like to the Pontic monarch of old days,
He fed on poisons, and they had no power,
But were a kind of nutriment; he lived
Through that which had been death to many nen,
And made him friends of mountains: with the stars
And the quick Spirit of the Universe

He held his dialogues! and they did teach
To him the magic of their mysteries;
To him the book of Night was open'd wide,
And voices from the deep abyss reveal'd
A marvel and a secret-Be it so.

IX.

My dream was past; it had no further change.
It was of a strange order, that the doom
Of these two creatures should be thus traced out
Almost like a reality-the one

To end in madness-both in misery.*

July, 1816.

ADVERTISEMENT.

Ar Ferrara, in the Library, are preserved the original MSS. of Tasso's Gierusalemme and of Guarini's

[This touching picture agrees closely, in many of its circumstances, with Lord Byron's own prose account of the wedding in his Memoranda; in which he describes himself as waking, on the morning of his marriage, with the most melancholy reflections, on seeing his wedding-suit spread out before him. In the same mood, he wandered about the grounds alone, till he was summoned for the ceremony, and joined, for the first time, on that day, his bride and her family. He knelt down-he repeated the words after the clergyman; but a mist was before his eyes-his thoughts were elsewhere; and he was but awakened by the congratulations of the bystanders to find that he was-married.MOORE.]

2["For it becomes the telescope of truth,

And shows us all things naked as they are."-MS.] 3 Mithridates of Pontus.

Pastor Fido, with letters of Tasso, one from Titian to Ariosto, and the inkstand and chair, the tomb and the house, of the latter. But, as misfortune has a greater interest for posterity, and little or none for

4 [This poem is written with great beauty and genius-but is extremely painful. We cannot maintain our accustomed tone of levity, or even speak like calm literary judges, in the midst of these agonizing traces of a wounded and distem pered spirit. Even our admiration is swallowed up in a most painful feeling of pity and of wonder. It is impossible to mistake these for fictitious sorrows, conjured up for the purpose of poetical effect. There is a dreadful tone of sincerity, and an energy that cannot be counterieited, in the expression of wretchedness, and alienation from humankind, which occurs in every line of this poem.-JEFFREY.)

B [In a moment of dissatisfaction with himself, or during some melancholy mood, when his soul felt the worthlessness | of fame and glory, Lord Byron told the world that his mouse should, for a long season, shroud herself in solitude, (see ! ante, p. 470;) and every true lover of genius lamented that

the cotemporary, the cell where Tasso was confined in the hospital of St. Anna attracts a more fixed attention than the residence or the monument of Ariostoat least it had this effect on me. There are two inscriptions, one on the outer gate, the second over the cell itself, inviting, unnecessarily, the wonder and the induation of the spectator. Ferrara is much decayed, and depopulated: the castle still exists entire; and I saw the court where Parisina and Hugo were beheaded, according to the annal of Gibbon.1

THE LAMENT OF TASSO.

I.

LONG years!-It tries the thrilling frame to bear And eagle-spirit of a child of Song—

ber lofty music was to cease. But there was a tide in his spirit obeying the laws of its nature, and not to be controlled by any human will. When he said that he was to be silent, he looked, perhaps, into the inner regions of his soul, and saw there à dim, hard, and cheerless waste, like the sand of the seashore; but the ebbed waves of passion in due course returned, and the scene was restored to its former beauty and magnificence,-its foam, its splendors, and its thunder. The mind of a mighty poet cannot submit even to chains of its own imposing: when it feels most enslaved, even then, perhaps, is it about to become most free; and one sudden flash may raise it from the darkness of its despondency up to the pure air of untroubled confidence. It required, therefore, but small knowledge of human nature, to assure ourselves that the obligation under which Lord Byron had laid himself could not bind, and that the potent spirit within him would laugh to scorn whatever dared to curb the phrensy of is own inspirations.

1

It was not long, therefore, till he again came forth in his perfect strength, and exercised that dominion over our spirits which is truly a power too noble to be possessed without being wielded. Though all his heroes are of one family, yet are they a noble band of brothers, whose countenances and whose souls are strongly distinguished by peculiar characteristics. Each personage, as he advances before us, reminds us of some other being, whose looks, thoughts, words, and deeds had troubled us by their wild and perturbed grandeur. But though all the same, yet are they all strangely different. We hail each successive existence with a profounder sympathy; and we are lost in wonder, in fear, and in sorrow, at the infinitely varied struggles, the endless and agonizing modifications of the tunan passions, as they drive along through every gate and avenue of the soul, darkening or brightening, elevating or laying prostrate.

From such agitating and terrific pictures, it is delightful to turn to those compositions in which Lord Byron has allowed hy soul to sink down into gentler and more ordinary feelings. Many beautiful and pathetic strains have flowed from las heart, of which the tenderness is as touching as the grandeur of his nobler works is agitating and sublime. To those, indeed, who looked deeply into his poetry, there never was at any time a want of pathos; but it was a pathos so subduing and so profound, that even the poet himself seemed afraid of being delivered up unto it. hay. be seemed ashamed of being overcome by emotions, whet the gloomy pride of his intellect often vally strove to scorn; and he dashed the weakness from his heart, all the tear from his eyes, like a man suddenly assallel by feelil za which he wished to hide, and which, thought true to his ne ture, were inconsistent with the character which that ne tenous nature had been forced, as in self-defence, to a** „*A But there is one poem in which he has a.mesT WIL aside all remembrance of the darker and storiller pan in which the tone of his spirt and his voice at stee changed, and where he who seemed to care g

agonies, and remorse, and despair. and death, and sanity, in all their most appalling forins, stown that we tak a heart that can feed on the purest sympatier d

ture, and deliver itself up to the sorrows, the

the melancholy of humbler souls. The Pr lon" is a poem over which Infancy has shed

tenous tears for sorrows so aber to a way

cence, over which the gentle, pure, and powd

Long years of outrage, calumny, and wrong;
Imputed madness, prison'd solitude,
And the mind's canker in its savage mood,
When the impatient thirst of light and air
Parches the heart; and the abhorred grate,
Marring the sunbeams with its hideous shade,
Works through the throbbing eyeball to the brain,
With a hot sense of heaviness and pain;
And bare, at once, Captivity display'd
Stands scoffing through the never-open'd gate,
Which nothing through its bars admits, save day,
And tasteless food, which I have eat alone
Till its unsocial bitterness is gone;

And I can banquet like a beast of prey,
Sullen and lonely, couching in the cave
Which is my lair, and-it may be-my grave."
All this hath somewhat worn me, and may wear,
But must be borne. I stoop not to despair;
For I have battled with mine agony,
And made me wings wherewith to overfly

Woman has brooded with ineffable, and yearning, and bursting tenderness of affection, and over which old Age, almost loosened from this world, has bowed his hoary head in delighted approbation of that fraternal love, whose beauty and simplicity fling a radiance over the earth he is about to leave, and exhibit our fallen nature in near ap proximation to the glonies of its ultimate destiny. The Lament" possesses much of the tenderness and pathos of the "Prisoner of Chillon." Lord Byron has not delivered himself unto any one wild and fearful vision of the impris oned Tasso,-he has not dared to allow himself to rush forward with headlong passion into the horrors of his dungeon, and to describe, as he could fearfully have done, the conflict and agony of his uttermost despair, but he shows us the poet sitting in his cell, and singing there a low, melancholy, wailing Lament, sometimes, indeed, bordering on utter wretchedness, but oftener partaking of a settled grief, occasionally subdued into mournful resignation, cheered by delightful remembrances, and elevated by the confident hope of an immortal fame. His is the gathered grief of many years, over which his soul has brooded, till she has in some measure lost the power of misery, and this soliloquy is one which we can believe he might have uttered to himself any morning, or noon, or night of his solitude, as he seemed to be half commemang with his own heart, and half addressing the ear of that human nature from which he was shut out, but of which he felt the com tinual and abiding presence within his imagination FESSOR WILSON

The original MS of this poem is dated, "The Apen nines, April 20, 1917." It was written in consequence of Lord Byron having visited Ferrara, for a single day, on his way to Florence. In a letter from Rothe, he say Lament of Tarso, which I went from kiorence trust, arrived. I look on it where be good rhyme as Pope's papa xaɗd to hum when he was a y

*(Tan's biographer, the Ae Pergamy, linjeft it with out doubt, that the freten of the porn pitcher and you his desire to se quote, water free from b servitude at the enor of Army. to v Rome,

The narrow circus of my dungeon wall,
And freed the Holy Sepulchre from thrall;
And revell'd among men and things divine,
And pour'd my spirit over Palestine,
In honor of the sacred war for Him,
The God who was on earth and is in heaven,
For he has strengthen'd me in heart and limb.
That through this sufferance I might be forgiven,
I have employ'd my penance to record

How Salem's shrine was won and how adored.

II.

But this is o'er-my pleasant task is done :-1
My long-sustaining friend of many years!
If I do blot thy final page with tears,

Know, that my sorrows have wrung from me none.
But thou, my young creation! my soul's child!
Which ever playing round me came and smiled,
And woo'd me from myself with thy sweet sight,
Thou too art gone-and so is my delight:
And therefore do I weep and inly bleed
With this last bruise upon a broken reed.
Thou too art ended-what is left me now?
For I have anguish yet to bear-and how?
I know not that-but in the innate force
Of my own spirit shall be found resource.
I have not sunk, for I had no remorse,

Nor cause for such: they call'd me mad-and why?
Oh Leonora! wilt not thou reply ?2

I was indeed delirious in my heart
To lift my love so lofty as thou art;
But still my phrensy was not of the mind

;

I knew my fault, and feel my punishment
Not less because I suffer it unbent.
That thou wert beautiful, and I not blind,
Hath been the sin which shuts me from mankind;
But let them go, or torture as they will,
My heart can multiply thine image still;
Successful love may sate itself away,

The wretched are the faithful; 'tis their fate
To have all feeling save the one decay,
And every passion into one dilate,
As rapid rivers into ocean pour;

But ours is fathomless, and hath no shore.

cell, over the door of which is the following inscription:"Rispettate, O posteri, la celebrità di questa stanza, dove Torquato Tasso, infermo più di tristezza che delirio, ditenuto dimorò anni vii. mesi ii., scrisse verse e prose, e fu rimesso in liberta ad instanza della città di Bergamo, nel giorno vi. Luglio, 1586."-The dungeon is below the ground floor of the hospital, and the light penetrates through its grated window from a small yard, which seems to have been common to other cells. It is nine paces long, between five and six wide, and about seven feet high. The bedstead, so they tell, has been carried off piecemeal, and the door half cut away, by the devotion of those whom "the verse and prose" of the prisoner have brought to Ferrara. The poet was confined in this room from the middle of March, 1579, to December, 1580, when he was removed to a contiguous apartment much larger, in which, to use his own expressions, he could philosophize and walk about." The inscription is incorrect as to the immediate cause of his enlargement, which was promised to the city of Bergamo, but was carried into effect at the intercession of Don Vincenzo Gonzaga, Prince of Mantua.-HOBHOUSE.]

[The opening lines bring the poet before us at once, as if the door of the dungeon was thrown open. From this bitter complaint, how nobly the unconquered bard rises into calm, and serene, and dignified exultation over the beauty of "that young creation, his soul's child," the Gierusalemme Liberata! The exultation of conscious genius then dies away, and we behold him, "bound between distraction and discase," no longer in an inspired mood, but sunk into the lowest prostration of human misery. There is something terrible in this transition from divine rapture to degraded agony.-WILSON.] 2 [In a letter written to his friend Scipio Gonzaga, shortly after his confinement. Tasso exclaims- Ah, wretched me! I had designed to write, besides two epic poems of most noble

Above me,

III.

hark! the long and maniac cry Of minds and bodies in captivity.

And hark! the lash and the increasing howl,
And the half-inarticulate blasphemy!

There be some here with worse than phrensy foul,
Some who do still goad on the o'er-labor'd mind,
And dim the little light that's left behind
With needless torture, as their tyrant will

Is wound up to the lust of doing ill:3

With these and with their victims am I class'd, 'Mid sounds and sights like these long years have pass'd; 'Mid sights and sounds like these my life may close: So let it be for then I shall repose.

IV.

I have been patient, let me be so yet;

I had forgotten half I would forget,

But it revives-Oh! would it were my lot

To be forgetful as I am forgot!

Feel I not wroth with those who bade me dwell
In this vast lazar-house of many woes?
Where laughter is not mirth, nor thought the mind,
Nor words a language, nor ev'n men mankind;
Where cries reply to curses, shrieks to blows,
And each is tortured in his separate hell-
For we are crowded in our solitudes-
Many, but each divided by the wall,

Which echoes Madness in her babbling moods :-
While all can hear, none heed his neighbor's call-
None! save that One, the veriest wretch of all,'
Who was not made to be the mate of these,
Nor bound between Distraction and Disease.
Feel I not wroth with those who placed me here?
Who have debased me in the minds of men,
Debarring me the usage of my own,
Blighting my life in best of its career,
Branding my thoughts as things to shun and fear?
Would I not pay them back these pangs again,
And teach them inward Sorrow's stifled groan?
The struggle to be calm, and cold distress,
Which undermines our Stoical success?
No!-still too proud to be vindictive-I
Have pardon'd princes' insults, and would die.

argument, four tragedies, of which I had formed the plan. I had schemed, too, many works in prose, on subjects the most lofty, and most useful to human life; I had designed to write philosophy with eloquence, in such a manner that there might remain of me an eternal memory in the world. Alas! I had expected to close my life with glory and renown; but now, oppressed by the burden of so many calamities, I have lost every prospect of reputation and of honor. The fear of perpetual imprisonment increases my melancholy; the mifignities which I suffer augment it; and the squalor of my beard, my hair, and habit, the sordidness and filth, exceedingly annoy me. Sure am I, that, if SHE who so little has corresponded to my attachment-if she saw me in such a state, and in such affliction-she would have some compassion on me."--Opere, t. x. p. 387.]

[For nearly the first year of his confinement Tasso endured all the horrors of a solitary cell, and was under the care of a jailer whose chief virtue, although he was a poet and a man of letters, was a cruel obedience to the commands of his prince. His name was Agostino Mosti Tasso says of him, in a letter to his sister, "ed usa meco ogni sorte di rigore ed inumanità."-HORHOUSE.]

[This fearful picture is finely contrasted with that which Tasso draws of himself in youth, when nature and medita tion were forming his wild, romantic, and impassioned genius. Indeed, the great excellence of the Lament" consists in the ebbing and flowing of the noble prisoner's soul --his feelings often come suddenly from afar off-sometunes gentle airs are breathing, and then all at once arise the! storms and tempest.--the gloom, though black as might while it endures, gives way to frequent bursts of radiance, -and when the wild strain is closed, our pity and commis eration are blended with a sustaining and elevating sense of the grandeur and majesty of his character.-WILSON }