"To aid thy mind's developement,-to watch
Thy dawn of little joys,-to sit and see
Almost thy very growth,-to view thee catch
Knowledge of objects-wonders yet to thee!
To hold thee lightly on a gentle knee,

And print on thy soft cheek a parent's kiss,—
This it should seem, was not reserved for me;
Yet this was in my nature as it is,

I know not what is there, yet something like to this."

Oh, when he sings thus, and all the man seems stirred within him; when the great heart of him beats humanly, and the mine of his love is laid open, and its affluence poured forth; when he reveals the one remaining chord that still binds him to us in heart and kindly brotherhood, we feel that we could forgive him all the havoc that he endeavoured to make in the world. Oh, yes, we can deeply sympathise with the father's intense feeling and woe, we can mourn over the griefs and the sorrows of that throbbing breast, -we begin to think that he and the world need not have been such foes after all, and the demon for a time becomes forgotten in the man.

Again. When he sings a hymn to the Eternal Divineness of Beauty; when in a nobler mood than that in which he composed the Don Juan, he calls forth our best and holiest aspirations, as he follows the wandering Childe in his glorious pilgrimage, with him bidding a sad and solemn adieu to his native land, and visiting the verdant fields, the sky-crowned mountains, and the gorgeous cities of the continent-when he thrills the soul at sound of the once powerful name of Spain, and recounts in glowing poetry her mighty deeds performed in ancient days, when Spanish chivalry was allied to freedom, when Spaniards, for the sake of liberty and God, unsheathed the victorious sword for a goodly slaughter, vanquished the turbaned Infidel, and drove him to seek a dominion and a home on other and less noble shores-when he enters the sacred boundary of Greece, the birthplace of freedom, the home of ancient glory, the shrine of philosophy and wisdom, the altar of religion and the abode of Gods; when he communes with the spirits of her departed great amidst the ruins of that once mighty civilization, that seemed about to span the world, and to clevate man to an equality with the Gods; when in her wild and desolated sanctuary, surrounded by the crumbling monuments of her decayed grandeur, where the tall statue of Minerva once reared her superb head, and, as the outward representation of deified wisdom, received the homage of ten thousand worshippers; or on the empty site of the ruined porch, where eager listeners once hung wrapt on every word uttered by the philosopher's in

spired voice, he tunes a hymn of reverent adulation to “Athena ! ancient of days!"-when he pursues the devious wanderings of the Rhine, and exultingly hymns "the exulting river;" when on the castled crag of Drachenfels he offers up a tributary song to love and beauty; when by the shattered wall of Ehreinbreitstein he mourns over the dismantled and ruined fortress; when on the lovely banks of Lake Leman he holds converse with the guardian spirit of the immortal Rousseau—or when he enters the glowing land of Italy, the land endeared to freedom by her ancient and modern achievements and heroes; when at Florence, in the precincts of Santa Croce, he calls to mind the memories of the great spirits who have shed over their land the lustre of their own immortal names, of Angelo and Dante, Boccacio, Petrarch, and Galileo; or at Rome, in the shadow of the Colosseum, haunted by the thought of the worse than death of the sevenhilled city, the mother of empires, whose mighty sons no longer throw their protecting strength around the altar of liberty, whose lofty domes but shield the dwelling-place of papal tyranny and hydra-headed superstition, he deplores the decay of her ancient spirit and her ancient glory, and laments for her as for the “ Niobe of nations"—when thus his song reaches us in noble tone and lofty music, when he exalts the soul at thought of beauty, or thrills the man at the name of freedom, following out the true mission of the poet, ennobling and purifying the feelings and the aspirations, directing the race upwards and onwards, we feel him one both loveable and divine-then it is that he appears to us worthy of a shrine in the temple of poesy; worthy of a seat by the side of Homer; worthy of the wreath along with Milton; worthy of being named in a breath with Shelley as one of the poetkings of the world then it is that his song comes to us clothed in the harmony and the purity that befits the muse, as a something greater and a something mightier, than a mere worldvoice, as one of the inspired utterances of creation, as an echo caught up from the realms of God.

How we would fain hail him for one of the High Priests of Beauty, could we but forget how greatly he abused the mighty energies of his being in labouring to pollute beauty's pure flowing stream! Oh! that, like Shelley, he might have cast down his haughty brow before the silent majesty of the Great Whole, and with the simplicity of a child have listened to the magnanimous preaching of nature, and have learnt from her a lesson of goodness and of love.

Oh! why, for a moment, should he have forgotten the grandeur

of his mission? Why should he have connected with base and unhallowed thoughts that which has ever appeared to the poet the divinest of God's divine attributes? The power of love is the purest, the holiest feeling, that reigns enthroned in the heart of man, and when the man guards it, as it should be guarded, from the debasing influences of the world around, it tends to mollify and soothe the strife of the soul within; it renders the heart the home of virtuous and holy thought; it acts as his redeemer from many a temptation, and from many a snare; it tends to ennoble and exalt the mind, and to bring the man into more intimate communion with the Divine Creator of all Beauty. Oh! had Byron but guarded this power of Love within him from contamination! Had he but reverenced beauty and goodness as they should be reverenced! Had he but kept a watch over his own heart, and raised therein a barrier to the entry of the world's pollution! But, let us pause, and remember that all blame is not due to Byron ; that, in a great measure, he was influenced by circumstances unfavourable to a healthy growth of mind. If we but consider the thousand indignities heaped upon that mighty soul by the puny beings unworthy of mention in the same breath with him, we may almost cease to wonder that he lost his faith in God and in humanity; it becomes, then, small matter for surprise that he should have built himself up in the strong castle of individual self, and have showered thence his contempt on the world of pigmies beneath him. Ah! noble Byron! Hadst thou not fallen on untoward circumstances, what yet grander things thou mightest have accomplished! But soul-suffering and a blighted heart have too frequently been the rewards of genius! often hath the great man passed through the fiery ordeal of grief,

"Trod the red-hot bars of fiery torture,

And gone a weary way with bleeding feet."

The crown of genius hath too generally proved a crown of thorns, and the great man's high hopes of glory have seldom been fated to produce aught but bitter fruit. Seldom does the world reverence its true sovereigns until they cease to belong to the things that are; and then it seeks to gratify the dead with the empty recompense of an immortal fame. Oh! man of genius, whosever thou art, thou hast a reward in thine own soul, and that empty hope of an empty fame affords thee joy sufficient to recompense thee for all thy sorrows and for all thy indignities in the days that are. Truly, oh, large-hearted son of God! thou livest for the future, and not for the present. What matter though the Present part thy garments

and put upon thee a crown of thorn, thou knowest that the Future shall array thee in royal robes, and enshroud thee in a halo of immortal glory.

Whatever in thee is Catholic, and flows not from the impulse of thine own individual self, but from the impulse, or, to use a better expression, from the inspiration of the great connecting spirit of universal things; whatever in thee has a tendency to overleap the present, and to make its home and to cast its lot in the deep heart of futurity; whatever in thee is most accordant with the Divine mind whose attributes are beauty, and goodness, and love, most in harmony with the eternal anthem that nature, from her extreme limits, daily and hourly pours forth in praise of her infinite Creator; whatever in thee is calculated to exalt thyself or thy brother man above the mere carnality of this worldly nature, to purify the heart, and to etherealize the soul; whatever in thee tends to ennoble the aspirations, to lift the man above the individual, to direct the thought beyond that which is of the earth, earthly, to things which are heavenly and of heaven; this, oh, man of genius! inasmuch as it bears relation to the great universe, of which thou art but an individual atom, relation not as to particular phase or sphere, but to the unbounded and harmonious whole, this shall exist for ever; this through the long and restless ages shall carry thee forward as the mouthpiece and the oracle of thy fellow men ; this shall bid defiance to all fear of end or change; this shall bear dominion and sway beyond the earth and the bounds of time; this shall shine everlastingly, pure as a gem from the throne of the living God, in time and in eternity, alike lucent of his perennial brightness.

But we digress.-We return to Byron. One fault, too frequently noticeable in his poetry, is a want of definite purpose. Several of his greatest productions appear devoid of aim; they are beautiful fragments detached from the complete statue; or rather, we have the magnificently sculptured Venus, with the symmetry of the form perfect, and grace in every limb, but the head is wanting. With the exception of his tragedies, his poems generally are nothing more than beautiful but purposeless romances; even Childe Harolde, with all its grandeur, and colossal strength, and classic beauty, is scarcely more than this.

For this once more we must lay blame on his characteristic scepticism. A mind in doubt is always a mind devoid of purpose; the poet-sceptic hath an aimless genius.

And here again this term poet-sceptic involves a contradiction, for the Poet should be the High Priest of the world, and his aim the beautiful, the true, the good; it should be his constant en

deavour to reach the far heights of Divinity; he should be a light fixed amid the world's darkness; a star illuming for the eye of man the abode of God. In this Byron failed.Only when the Poet was in the ascendant, and the sceptic was for the while entirely laid aside, did he in any degree approach towards the fulfilment of his mission; anon, the doubt arose, the demon waxed strong, and the great soul became a polluted thing.

Here let us pause! It is as the poet-sceptic that we have considered Byron, and whatever more we might be disposed to write, could only tend to one and the same conclusion. He was the poetsceptic, the only poet-sceptic in a real sense, the only living embodiment of this great contradiction, that ever did exist, and perhaps that ever will exist. It pleased God that this man should live, one of the adjuncts to his inscrutable and eternal mystery; it pleased God that this man should live, one necessary to the fulfilment of his eternal purpose; it pleased God that this man existing as an iota within the great universe of past, present, and future, should yet thus discover and live out in his own person one phase of eternal being. Standing within the confines of the material world, we ponder upon the after-life with fear and trembling, and would fain shuddering cast a glance into the dim spirit-land. No voice comes thence save in half inarticulate whispers; but that we know not now, we shall know hereafter. In the meanwhile of Byron, turbulent-spirited, poet-sceptic, pendulum-vibrating between light and darkness, let us think all hopefully and trustfully; God's ways are not as our ways,-let us have faith in the justice, and above all in the goodness of the After Judge.

We close the book so full of meaning, and clasp the clasp of the poet's life. W. T. MATSON.

LOVE.

THE earth is full of love, albeit the storms
Of passion mar its influence benign

And drown its voice with discords, every flower
That to the sun its heaving breast expands

Is born of love, and every song of bird
That floats, mellifluent, on the balmy air
Is but a love-note. Heaven is full of love,
Its starry eyes run o'er with tenderness,
And soften every heart that meets their gaze,
As downward looking on this wayward world
They light it back to God. But neither stars,
Nor flowers, nor song of birds, nor earth, nor heaven,
So tell the wonders of that glorious name
As they shall be revealed when comes the hour
Of nature's consummation, hoped for long,
When, passed the chequered vestibule of Time,
The creature in immortal youth shall bloom,
And good, unmixed with ill, for ever reign.-R.

E