But his love of nature was not only passionate; it was thoughtful and imaginative. He knew that true poetic description must go beyond the rapture which mere bodily sight can give, and deal with all of which this material world is symbolical. His strong poetic instincts, when they chanced to be associated with true and healthy feeling, gave forth often grand or beautiful description; he aspired to the highest reach of poetic description of nature, for of himself he said,

"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 the voices from the deep abyss reveal'd
A marvel and a secret."

But these aspirations were frustrated, for a moral weakness perverted and lowered them, causing an inequality in his poetry which it is lamentable to look at. At one moment we believe that we are about to behold him

"Springing from crystal step to crystal step,

In the bright air, where none can follow him;"

but straightway we see the winged energy dragged down to earth, soiled with earthy things, and stumbling in the darkness and the mire of low and turbid passions. Aspiring to commune with the infinite, the poet's heart, and therefore his genius too, were cramped within the narrow confines of petty pride and weak hatred. The blindness of idolatry came over him. The world of sight and sound became a divinity to him. That which was meant for only a means to higher ends was made all in all to him. The material world, framed as it so wonderfully is, to minister not only to our bodily wants, but to the imaginative appetites which feed on the grand and the beautiful, hemmed his faithless spirit in; and the genius of Byron had not power enough to extricate him from the shallow sophistries of materialism. His strong passion for nature, divorcing itself from the vision of faith, began to spread itself in misty rhapsodies, meaningless of every thing but the old errors of sensuous systems of unbelief. When Byron's poetry began to utter materialism, it began to utter folly, and then it ceases to be poetry, for poetry is allied to wisdom, and not to madness. He talked of loving earth only for its earthly sake, "becoming a portion of that around him;" of high mountains being a feeling to him; and

L

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

Feel all I see, less dazzling, but more warm?

The bodiless thought? The spirit of each spot,

Of which, even now, I share at times, the immortal lot.

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

Now, if we seek a solution of the strange inequality of Byron's poetic power, and the perversion and imperfection of his descriptions

of nature, it is in this happy truth that the cultivation of the imagination is dependent on the moral feelings; and all

"Outward forms, the loftiest, still receive

Their finer influences from the life within."

Coleridge, in his Ode on Dejection, tells us that the poetic vision of nature is sealed even to that uncongenial mood—

"The wan and heartless mood

A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear;
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,

Which finds no natural outlet-no relief

In word, or sigh, or tear

*

My genial spirits fail,

*

And what can these avail

To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?

It were a vain endeavour,

Though I should gaze forever

On that green light that lingers in the West.

I may not hope, from outward forms, to win

The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.

And from the soul itself must there be sent

A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth---

Of all sweet sounds the life and element!"

But if the fountain of the life within be not only darkened with dejection, but turbid with evil passions-if the soul itself be distempered-it cannot send forth "the beautiful and the beauty-making power," but, in its stead, such perplexed and lurid flashes as burst from the genius of Byron.

That wise expounder of poetic power and of nature, the author of "The Modern Painters," has justly said that "all egotism and selfish care or regard are, in proportion to their constancy, destructive of imagination, whose play and power depend altogether on our being able to forget ourselves, and enter, like possessing spirits, into the bodies of things about us." Now there is deep instruction in this-that, whenever Byron's imagination rose above that selfishness which was his clinging vice, his greatest power was displayed; and it is woful to see how often this leprosy is breaking out on the poet's brow as he stands by the incense-altar.

There is this further admonition in all that Byron failed in-an

admonition plain and irresistible—that just so far as poet or philosopher places himself in antagonism to Divine Truth, so far must he fail in all that he adventures in the deep things of nature, of man, of his own soul. "Science," it has been justly said, by Charles Julius Hare, “in the hands of infidelity, degenerates into crumbling materialism: it is blind to the beauty, deaf to the harmony of the universe; as its objects rise, it sinks; when it comes to treat of human nature, its views are base and degrading; its morality is a matter of barter, or a wary drifting along before the animal impulses. And what can the poetry of infidelity be, except a deifying of the senses and the passions, while the consciousness of higher cravings and aspirations, which cannot be wholly extinguished, vents itself in bursts of self-mockery, or in the cold sneer of derision and contempt for all mankind? The highest truth and grandeur that pagan poetry attained, what were they but aspirations for the coming Christian truth? And when, in Christian times, the poet rejects that truth, refusing its light, he takes up his abode in darkness deeper than the heathen's, and it is impossible for him to comprehend, much less expound, nature, himself, or his fellow-men; for nowhere can the unaided, solitary mind of man travel, whether it be into his own moral and spiritual nature, with the mysterious tribunal of conscience, so weak and so strong, or into the hearts of mankind, or to the mute creation, or into the spaces of the universe, to the blade of grass at our feet, or the most distant star in the firmament,-nowhere can it travel, but it shall find itself baffled by mystery-mystery, the burden of which grows heavier and heavier the farther it is removed from the only truth that can solve it:

"For the soul,

At every step when she avowed her call,

Sees, yet adores not the Adorable.

More faint and faint the gleams which with him dwell,
Break out on her; more feebly His dear voice,

That which alone bids nature to rejoice,

More faint and faint she hears; till all alone,

From scene to scene of doubt, she wanders on

Along a dreary waste, starless and long,
Starless and sad, a dreary waste along,
Uncheer'd, unsatisfied, for evermore

Companionless, and fatherless, and poor."

With a mind too vigorous for inaction, and a temper too proud and wilful for either the moral or intellectual discipline which the greatest writers recognise as a duty they ask no exemption from, Lord Byna" amid the large variety of his productions, has left no one elaborate, wes

sustained poem; and the evidence of his genius is to be found in passages or in the short poems, such as the "Prisoner of Chillon," or, what is perhaps the first and most faultless of his poems (which I should be glad to pause on), "The Dream."

If a fitful irregularity were characteristic of this splendid career of authorship, no less so was the close of it. All restraint growing more vexatious and burdensome to him, whether the discipline of his heart, the discipline of society, or the discipline of conscience, he fashioned that ribald poem, Don Juan, to let his fancy riot in. It was an ignominious retreat for genius, the last act of self-degradation. I cite one stanza from it, to show, by a contrast that shall follow, to what base uses a poet can bring his talent. He looks at the metropolis of England, with the dome of St. Paul's, sublime in magnitude, and venerable by the devotions of many generations—the dead and the living—and thus he images it:

"A mighty mass of brick, and smoke, and shipping,

Dirty and dusky, but as wide as eye

Could reach, with here and there a sail just skipping

In sight-then lost amidst a forestry

Of masts;-a wilderness of steeples peeping
On tiptoe through their sea-coal canopy;

A huge, dim cupola, like a foolscap crown
On a fool's head-and this is London town."

I do not pause to say what pitiable prostitution this is of the poetic talent, corrupting the fancy with such a mean association of poor and heartless wit; but, in the contrast, let me sweep the scoff from out your thoughts by a short sentence, not clothed in verse, but overflowing with poetry; not graced with metrical music, but glowing with the purity and the grandeur of imaginative truth: "It was only the other morning," says the living writer from whom I quote, " as I was crossing one of the bridges which bear us from our mighty metropolis, that paramount city of the earth, that I was struck, for the thousandth time it may be, by the majesty with which the dome dedicated to the apostle of the Gentiles rises out of the surrounding sea of houses; and I could not but feel what a noble type it is of the city set upon a hill; I could not but acknowledge that thus it behooves the church to rise out of the world, with her feet amid the world, with her head girt only by the sky."

Byron's career of authorship and life brought him, it might be said almost without exaggeration, superannuated at the age of thirty-seven, to the grave. There is a passage in "Manfred" which has, I think, a fearful significancy as an image of that proud defiance with which