CHAPTER XLVII.—GEORGE GORDON BYRON.—1788-1824.

I.-Biographical.

1. As Scott retired from the field of poesy, England's muse began to inspire young Lord Byron. He was descended from a family whose name appears in the Doomsday Book of William the Conqueror, a family noted for its pride and loyalty. His father, who was a captain in the Guards, wasted his estate in dissipation, and died leaving a daughter and the subject of this notice. The poet's mother was Catherine Gordon, an only child and an heiress, although she sold what her husband left of her estate for about seventy-five pounds. Young Byron was only five years of age when his father died, and at ten he inherited the title and estates of his great-uncle, William, Lord Byron. He was placed under the care of a noble relative, who sent him to Harrow and to Trinity College, Cambridge. At nineteen he went to the family estate, known as Newstead Abbey, an old monastery granted to his ancestors by Henry the Eighth, and here he published his first poems, under the title of Hours of Idleness. The Edinburgh Review mercilessly criticised the young Lord, for which he took severe revenge in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, a poetical satire as acrimonious as Pope's Dunciad, after which it was patterned.

2. Byron now left England, to travel in the countries of the Mediterranean. His travels are celebrated in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which at once made him famous. He returned to London, where he poured forth rapidly those Eastern tales The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, and Lara, poems as gorgeous and impassioned as the Oriental productions of Moore and Southey. In his twenty-seventh year the poet married the only daughter of Sir Ralph Milbanke. The ten thousand pounds which

a Giaour (jow'er), an infidel: a term applied by the Turks to disbelievers in the religion of Mahomet.

she brought him were quickly squandered, and, not long after the birth of a daughter, the lady returned home, never to rejoin her husband. Byron left England soon after the separation from his wife, to take up his abode in Italy. On his way there he stopped in Brussels, where he penned the famous description, found in Canto III. of Childe Harold, of the breaking up of a ball in that city, by the opening of

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II.-The Battle of Waterloo.
1. There was a sound of revelry by night,
And Belgium's capital had gathered there
Her beauty and her chivalry; and bright

The lamps shone o'er fair women and brave men ;
A thousand hearts beat happily; and when

Music arose with its voluptuous swell,

Soft eyes looked love to eyes which spake again,
And all went merry as a marriage-bell:

But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell!

2. Did ye not hear it?-No; 'twas but the wind,

Or the car rattling o'er the stony street;
On with the dance! let joy be unconfined;

No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet
To chase the glowing hours with flying feet—
But, hark!-that heavy sound breaks in once more,
As if the clouds its echo would repeat;

And nearer, clearer, deadlier than before!
Arm! Arm! it is-it is-the cannon's opening roar!

3. Within a windowed niche of that high hall
Sate Brunswick's fated chieftain; he did hear
That sound the first amidst the festival,
And caught its tone with Death's prophetic ear;
And when they smiled because he deemed it near,
His heart more truly knew that peal too well
Which stretched his father on a bloody bier,

And roused the vengeance blood alone could quell: He rushed into the field, and, foremost fighting, fell.

4. Ah! then and there was hurrying to and fro,
And gathering tears, and tremblings of distress,
And cheeks all pale, which but an hour ago
Blushed at the praise of their own loveliness;
And there were sudden partings, such as press
The life from out young hearts, and choking sighs
Which ne'er might be repeated; who could guess
If ever more should meet those mutual eyes,
Since upon night so sweet such awful morn could rise?

5. And there was mounting in hot haste: the steed,
The mustering squadron, and the clattering car,
Went pouring forward with impetuous speed,
And swiftly forming in the ranks of war;
And the deep thunder peal on peal afar;
And near, the beat of the alarming drum
Roused up the soldier ere the morning star;
While thronged the citizens with terror dumb,
Or whispering, with white lips, "The foc! They come!
they come!"

6. And wild and high the "Camerons' gathering" rose!
The war-note of Lochiel, which Albyn's hills
Have heard, and heard, too, have her Saxon foes:
How in the noon of night that pibroch thrills,
Savage and shrill! But with the breath which fills
Their mountain-pipe, so fill the mountaineers
With the fierce native daring which instils
The stirring memory of a thousand years,

And Evan's, Donald's" fame rings in each clansman's ears!

a Evan's, Donald's: Scottish chiefs. Sir Evan Cameron, Lord of Lochiel. His son Donald, called "The Gentle Lochiel," is the one referred to in Campbell's Lochiel's Warning.

7. And Ardennes" waves above them her green leaves, Dewy with Nature's tear-drops, as they pass, Grieving, if aught inanimate e'er grieves,

Over the unreturning brave,―alas!

Ere evening to be trodden like the grass

Which now beneath them, but above shall grow

In its next verdure, when this fiery mass

Of living valor, rolling on the foc,

And burning with high hope, shall moulder cold and low.

8. Last noon beheld them full of lusty life,

Last eve in Beauty's circle proudly gay,

The midnight brought the signal-sound of strife,
The morn the marshalling in arms, the day,
Battle's magnificently stern array!

The thunder-clouds close o'er it, which when rent,
The earth is covered thick with other clay,

Which her own clay shall cover, heaped and pent,
Rider and horse,-friend, foe,-in one red burial blent!

9. At Geneva Byron wrote The Prisoner of Chillon, and at Venice there came from his pen such light or riotous poems as Beppo, Mazeppa, and Don Juan, in wild contrast with the passionate and reckless tragedies Manfred, Cain, The Two Foscari, and Sardanapalus. Manfred was suggested by the Faust of Goethe; and that great German said of Byron, "That singular intellectual poet has taken my Faust to himself, and extracted from it the strongest nourishment to his hypochondriac humor." The following is one of the best portions of this short dramatic poem:

III.-Midnight Scene in Rome.

1. The stars are forth, the moon above the tops

Of the snow-shining mountains.-Beautiful!

a Ardennes. The battle was fought mostly in the wood of Soignies, a part of the ancient forest of Ardennes, celebrated in Tacitus, and immortalized in Shakspeare's drama As You Like It.

I linger yet with Nature, for the night
Hath been to me a more familiar face

Than that of man; and in her starry shade
Of dim and solitary loveliness

I learned the language of another world.

2. I do remember me, that in my youth,
When I was wandering,-upon such a night
I stood within the Coliseum's wall,
'Midst the chief relics of almighty Rome:
The trees which grew along the broken arches
Waved dark in the blue midnight, and the stars
Shone through the rents of ruin; from afar
The watch-dog bayed beyond the Tiber; and
More near, from out the Cæsars' palace came
The owl's long cry, and, interruptedly,
Of distant sentinels the fitful song
Begun and died upon the gentle wind.

3. Some cypresses beyond the time-worn breach
Appeared to skirt the horizon, yet they stood
Within a bow-shot. Where the Cæsars dwelt,
And dwell the tuneless birds of night, amidst
A grove which springs through levelled battlements
And twines its roots with the imperial hearths,
Ivy usurps the laurel's place of growth;
But the gladiators' bloody Circus stands,
A noble wreck in ruinous perfection!

While Cæsar's chambers and the Augustan halls
Grovel on earth in indistinct decay.

4. And thou didst shine, thou rolling moon, upon
All this, and cast a wide and tender light,
Which softened down the hoar austerity
Of rugged desolation, and filled up,
As 'twere anew, the gaps of centuries;