This quiet sail is as a noiseless wing

To waft me from distraction. Once I loved
Torn ocean's roar, but thy soft murmuring
Sounds sweet as if a sister's voice reproved

That I with stern delights should e'er have been so moved.

"It is the hush of night, and all between

Thy margin and the mountains, dusk, yet clear,
Mellowed and mingling, yet distinctly seen,
Save darkened Jura, whose capped heights appear
Precipitously steep; and drawing near,

There breathes a living fragrance from the shore,
Of flowers yet fresh with childhood; on the ear
Drops the light drip of the suspended oar,
Or chirps the grasshopper one good-night carol more.

"He is an evening reveller who makes
His life an infancy, and sings his fill;
At intervals, some bird from out the brake
Starts into voice a moment, then is still.
There seems a floating whisper on the hill,
But that is fancy; for the starlight dews
All silently their tears of love instil,
Weeping themselves away, till they infuse
Deep into Nature's breast the spirit of her hues.

"Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven,
If in your bright leaves we would read the fate
Of men and empires, - 't is to be forgiven
That in our aspirations to be great,
Our destinies o'erleap their mortal state,
And claim a kindred with you; for ye are

A beauty and a mystery, and create

In us such love and reverence from afar,

That fortune, fame, power, life, have named themselves a star.

"All heaven and earth are still, though not in sleep,

But breathless, as we grow when feeling most;

And silent, as we stand in thoughts too deep:

All heaven and earth are still: from the high host

Of stars, to the lulled lake and mountain coast,

All is concentred in a life intense,

Where not a beam, nor air, nor leaf is lost,
But hath a part of being, and a sense

Of that which is of all Creator and defence.

A truth which through our being then doth melt,
And purifies from self; it is a tone,

The soul and source of music, which makes known

Eternal harmony, and sheds a charm

Like to the fabled Cytherea's zone,

Binding all things with beauty; 't would disarm The spectre Death, had he substantial power to harm.

"The sky is changed; and such a change! O night,
And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong,
Yet lovely in your strength, as is the light
Of a dark eye in woman! Far along,
From peak to peak, the rattling crags among
Leaps the live thunder! not from one lone cloud,
But every mountain now hath found a tongue,
And Jura answers, through her misty shroud,
Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud!

Sky, mountains, river, winds, lake, lightnings! ye!
With night, and clouds, and thunder, and a soul
To make these felt and feeling, well may be
Things that have made me watchful. The far roll
Of your departing voices is the knoll

Of what in me is sleepless, - if I rest.

But where of ye, O tempests! is the goal?

Are ye like those within the human breast?

Or do ye find at length, like eagles, some high nest?

"Could I embody and unbosom now

That which is most within me; could I wreak
My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw
Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak,
All that I would have sought, and all I seek,
Bear, know, feel, and yet breathe, into one word,
And that one word were Lightning, I would speak;

But as it is, I live and die unheard,

With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword.

"The morn is up again, - the dewy morn,

With breath all incense, and with cheek all bloom,

Laughing the clouds away with playful scorn,

And living as if earth contained no tomb,

And, glowing into day; we may resume

The march of our existence; and thus I,

Still on thy shores, fair Leman! may find room

And food for meditation, nor pass by

Much that may give us pause, if pondered fittingly."

This magnificent handling of Nature, this description of the breathless lull before the storm, the burst of the clouds on Jura's head, the passionate invocation to lake, river, and mountain, all these, beside the poetry of the eighteenth century, were like a real thunder-storm beside a storm in a theatre.

Before Byron finished Childe Harold, he wrote a number of stories in verse, The Corsair, Lara, The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos. These stories, nearly all with a hero who lived in revolt against law and order, were accepted as pictures of the poet's own stormy nature. Already, in respectable English circles, there was much horror felt at this strange, original spirit, so lawless and reckless; and he made foes as well as friends by his poetry.

Going back to Italy a second time, Byron finished Childe Harold, and in his later years wrote several dramatic works. Werner, Sardanapalus, Cain, The Deformed Transformed, are among the best of these. These were dramatic in form, but not dramas in the sense of works fit for the action of the stage.

Byron's shorter or lyric poems do not match the longer ones in merit. His wings had a wide sweep, and he wanted plenty of room for his flights. The lyric poem was not his forte. His best short poems are to be found among some songs he wrote to Hebrew melodies. Here is one of the most familiar, a grand piece of word melody:

THE DESTRUCTION OF SENNACHERIB.

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Like the leaves of the forest when summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen;
Like the leaves of the forest when autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;

And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and forever grew still.

And there lay the steed, with his nostril all wide;
But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride,
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.

And there lay the rider, distorted and pale,
With dew on his brow and the rust on his mail;
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.

And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord.

There have been few poets who could handle language with Byron's ease and power. His rhyming is a marvel of facility. He wrote with a pen that played as freely as the lightning, and his thought never seemed to feel the bonds of rhyme.

In his poetry, Byron warmly took up the cause of Greece, which was then making an effort to free herself from the Turks. In Childe Harold and in other poems some grand passages are addressed to struggling Greece. The year before his death he entered into the plans of the Greek leaders in a war for their country's independence, and went to live at Missolonghi, where he mustered a band of soldiers in his own pay. Overwork and the bad climate threw him into a fever, and he was urged to leave the air of Missolonghi, which was malarious, and go elsewhere to recover. He refused, saying he would remain till Greece was either free or hopelessly subdued. He died soon after, at his post there, in the prime of life and genius. He used to say he had up to that time written only for women; in the last of his life he would write for men. Would he had been spared to do even greater things than Childe Harold!

BETWE

LV.

ON PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

ETWEEN Byron and PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, who were personal friends, there is a kind of resemblance in their lives, although they were men very unlike in character. They were both of aristocratic birth, both 1792-1822 held opinions very different from most young men in their position, and they won a similar reputation in their social circle, where their characters and their poetry were looked on by the conservative portion as dangerous and immoral.

Shelley had first drawn blame on himself in college, when he was barely twenty, by a publication which was condemned as atheistic; and he was expelled, finally, from Oxford. Much that he did later, confirmed the bad character this gave him in the eyes of respectable and wellordered English society, which, like Byron, he seemed bound to set at defiance.

In character Shelley was a noble, pure man. The conduct for which he was blamed sprang from his own highest ideal of right. His mind had early formed radically different theories from those of most men of his class. Born of the aristocracy, he was an extreme democrat; in religious and social ideas he was a freethinker. Considered apart from his opinions, he was a shy, scholarly man, inclined to immerse himself in books, unselfish, full of humanity, keenly sensitive to all the abuses and distresses in the world, and eager to make the world better at any cost. Byron said of him after his death, "He was, without exception, the best and least selfish man I ever knew."

He began to write very early. When he was fifteen he had completed two novels. In college he began his poem of Queen Mab, which was condemned as an atheistic production; and after he left college his works followed each other rapidly. Although he died at thirty, he had written a