Up rose that Dervise--not in saintly garb, But like a warrior bounding from his barb, Dash'd his high cap, and tore his robe awayShone his mail'd breast, and flash'd his sabre's ray! His close but glittering casque, and sable plume, More glittering eye, and black brow's subler gloom, Glared on the Moslems' eyes some Afrit sprite, Whose demon death-blow left no hope for fight. The wild confusion, and the swarthy glow swell, Flung o'er that spot of earth the air of hell! crew! A chief on land-an out-law on the deepDestroying-saving—prison'd—and asleep.” The meditations preceding this last circumstance, the war, the chaos of the mind, "When all its elements convuls'd-combin'd Lie dark and jarring with perturbed force, And gnashing with impenitent remorse; That juggling fiend-who never spake be fore, But cries, I warn'd thee! when the deed is o'er," with the harrowing anticipation of the tortures of impalement, form a well-judged introduction to-the friend. "Is it some seraph sent to grant him grace? No, 'tis an earthly form with heavenly face! It is Gulnare. "I come through darkness-and I scarce know why Yet not to hurt-I would not see thee die." Her tender approach-her -"shape of fairy lightness-naked foot That shines like snow, and falls on earth as mute," the wild joke of Conrad, and the description of that playfulness of sorrow which "Smiles in bitterness, but still it smiles,"and the passionate explanations of the tearful and tender, the trembling and yet resolute Gulnare-are all in the happiest spirit of poetical. conception, and leave us with the liveliest interest in the further denouement of the plot; in awe of Conrad-and half in love with Gulnare. Canto III. and last opens with a digression of about sixty lines upon the beauties of Athens and its neighbouring isles, where the scene of action is laid: and without pronouncing, ourselves, upon the excellence of the passage, we cannot but think his lordship must have held it in peculiar favour to think it capable and worthy of detaining the stretched curiosity of his reader, and of keeping these mighty cap.. tives, one in chains of iron, the other of love, whilst he tells us of - but my soul is Wrong'd-spurn'd-revil'd--and it shall be avenged !" and finally when in the open corridor, Conrad following her almost senseless, "They meet-upon her brow-unknownforgot "The grove of olives scattered dark and wide, I "Only bends in seeming o'er his beads, then, by the demon of suspicion, gathering thicker darkness on the tyrant's brow, as "He rose-and slowly, sternly, thence withdrew, Rage in his eye, and threats in his adieu.” -next by the apalling emotions of "that chief of womanhood, Which frowns ne'er quell'd, nor menaces subdued," when she declares "The crime!—'tis none to punish those of Seyd That hated tyrant-Conrad-he must bleed! Her hurrying hand had left-'twas but a spot Its hue was all he saw-and scarce with stood Oh! slight but certain pledge of crime't was blood." It would seem almost beyond the power of the most romantic fiction, after this bloody deed, to excite any further interest or sympathy in the fate of Gulnare. And yet within ten short stanzas,-no, not ten,-we find his lordship engaged in the bold attempt to summon all our pity and the tenderest emotions of our soul towards her, as we view her in Conrad's ship, surrounded by his curious and inquisitive crew, -"changed and humbled ;-faint and meek, But varying oft the colour of her cheek To deeper shades of paleness-ail its red That fearful spot which stain'd it from the dead. He took that hand-it trembled-now too late Own So soft in love-so wildly nerved in hate: After the interest excited in be half of this character, it could be no matter of difficulty to awaken the highest emotions, by the fate which he allots to the innocent Medora, "in cause so innocent, in fate so lamentable," upon whom Conrad is made to burst in her latticed bower,and to find her a corpse and in her shroud. We do not wish the reader to participate with us our shuddering sensation at this most undeserved and poetically unjust catastrophe of the only amiable character in the piece. Nor can we be at all surprized at the final disappearance, in moody mys tery, of the afflicted hero; more especially as the invulnerable sur vivor of so many deaths could scarcely have been expected to make his exit in any other manner. Here, therefore, we shall take our leave of the strange, but interesting, group, and of their noble poet; and shall conclude with a few homely, but friendly, hints to his lordship upon the past, the present, and the future. With respect to the present, (for like poets their critics can never stick to order) we cannot but see, amongst many delinquencies, much to commend and much to hope for in the poem of the Corsair. We do not hesitate to call Lord Byron a great master of the affections, and a powerful director of their several emotions. The immediate interest he excites in the story, and the enthusiastic sympathy with which he himself details, and forces others to trace, the rising events of his piece, we think are superior even to those of the wonder-working Minstrel of the North. Here indeed the comparison between Lord Byron and Walter Scott must end; and when we consider the age of each, the experience of each, perhaps the advisers of each, and the disproportioned intervals between their respective works, we are not willing to push a comparison, which would be manifestly unfair, any further. It is sufficient to hail the germ, or rather the expanding flower, of true poetic genius in Lord Byron's works. And when the exuberant leaves have been brushed away, or, to change the metaphor, when the high tone of colouring, and something almost approach, ing to the caricatura of painters in his descriptions, shall have been mellowed and melted down, under the influence of a mature judgment, we think enough will still remain to entitle the future works of Lord Byron at once to the admiration of contemporaries and the lasting regards of posterity. On the subject of metre, a most important one to a youthful poet, we only lament, that one avowedly so congenial to his lordship's mind, and in which unquestionably his best poem is written, the Spenser stanza, should be one on which the voice of ages, an infallible criterion, has pronounced unfavourably. The copiousness of language and the powers of versification, which it is no difficult task to discover in Lord Byron, eminently qualify him for that metre; and we should not, on the whole, be sorry to hear, that his lordship had chosen the legend of a seventh knight, to whom we could assign the patronage of one of the choicest Christian Virtues, as the subject of his maturer visions. Yet should an appeal to the formidable criterion above mentioned forbid such an attempt, it is happy for his lordship that his harp need not sleep upon the willows in mournful silence. The present poem convinces us of his powers in "the good old heroic couplet;" and that which so eminently possesses the very sanction of age which the other wants, we hesitate not to affirm, offers a field for very felicitous efforts to his lordship's pen. It is evident, indeed, that he has not fully learnt its use. It will by no means bear that sonnetteering style which, on more than one occasion, he has attempted to graft upon it. Neither can we see any reason for bringing us back to the infancy of this measure, when the frequent use of triplets was thought no anomaly, and the grave or falling syllable at the end of the first line no discord. Dr. Johnson, in a more advanced stage of English versification, has taught us both*, and common feeling we think might suggest to the most untutored ear, the inharmoniousness of the cadence which occurs in the very first couplet we have quoted in the character of Conrad. "That man of loneliness and mystery, Scarce seen to smile and seldom heard to sigh." We quote the following instance of the triplet for the double purpose of exposing a carelessness of Vid. Life of Dryden. another kind by no means uncommon in this poem. But he has said it-and the jealous well, Those tyrants, teasing, tempting to rebel, Deserve the fate, their fretting lips foretell." Why need the second line have intervened at all, to separate the well," even at best ill parted from the deserve?" 64 A similar ill disjunction may be noticed in the Bride of Abydos. And why, I know not, but within My heart, concealment weighs like sin." We mention this last poem in the present place, because we have not noticed it as a separate publication. It would be far from our plan to promise any, much less a regular, notice of this species of work. But being on the subject of Lord Byron, we think proper to recur to his former production so far as to observe, that we decidedly think his genius spurns the walk, humble and second rate every where but in Scott, of the octo-syllabic verse, which he has attempted, and but attempted, in the Bride of Abydos. The licence of metre to which this impotent attempt at confining the Thames to the banks of the New River has given birth, needs no comment and puts the Bride with many beautiful passages, perhaps some superior to the best in the Corsair, almost out of the range of metrical criticism *. With the powers of rhyming possessed by our noble author, we never expect to see him "Condescend the press to soil With epic blank like Hoylet.” We suppose our great poets, now-a days, are great despisers of the Stagyrite. Else we should hint the opinion given by that great critic upon the mixture of metres in the same poemn, Εσι δε ατοπώτερον ει Miyuudi tis 'auta, 'wonted yougnawr. C. 24 de Poet. vid. also C. 1. This is not the onlypoint in which the Corsair has much in proved, as we think, on the Bride of Aby dos. The luxuriancy of description is much pruned; and a single idea is not so often dwelt upon till it has survived its interest, and even lost its appropriateness. + Vid. "English Bards and Scotch Re viewers." Else we might whisper to his ear that all modern imitatious of Miltonic metre are not necessarily a stain on the press; and that, if the diversified and unlimited periods of the epic blank were ever ordained ' for any class of English poets, which we firmly believe they were, it is unquestionably for those whose richness of language, variety of ear, and fluency of imagination, could ill brook the tameness or the sameness of more regular but vulgar measures. We are conscious here of paying a private debt to a long and settled opinion of our own with respect to the chaste sublimity and exquisite rhythm of the Miltonic blank, even as exemplified in the pages of our loved Cowper. But if the heroic couplet be more to his lordship's heart, he has chosen well; he treads a line, which has sustained geniuses as lofty as his own; and let us add, which will still require much labour, much study, much experience, and much self-denial, before he will reach the standard of its best models. We hope his next production of this kind will not present us, at one time, with the easy fluency of Dryden; at another, with the measured stateliness of Pope; then with the epistolary carelessness of Cowper; and then with the mincing smoothness of Darwin. We meet, also, with rather more of what may be called direct adoptions from authors whom he has read, than is quite consistent with the pretensions of modern originality. A more extended reading, with much closer thought, and a more deliberate digestion of his acquired knowledge, may remedy that particularity and that crudeness which often marks the use of a few materials. From this hint, we are conscious of the rise of a long train of ideas, which to ourselves appear of much importance, in reference to Lord Byron's future proceedings, as an author, and also as a man, so far as he may be legitimately read in his works. Here, therefore, we cannot but give his lordship full permission to lay our paper aside, should he even have honoured it with his notice thus far: and the rest we must be supposed to speak as though Lord Byron heard us not, for the benefit rather of his readers, and more especially of any kindred spirit, who, captivated by his powers, might be just entering upon a similar poetical career. In calmly investigating the principles on which our noble author has hitherto proceeded, it is impossible not to discover throughout a deep and radical defect. The defect we allude to, is not so much a deficiency of morality in the piece, as an entire absence of moral. We in vain look for any meaning in the thing before us. It is a pretty picture, but we can find no subject in it. Like one of the carpets of his lordship's favourite country, the scene of so many of his plots, here are colours and figures, and borders and centers, but neither "the likeness of any thing that is in the heaven, nor in the earth, nor under the earth." We look into his own poet, the enchanting Spenser, and we find the Red Crosse Knight means Holiness; Sir Guyon means Temperance; and the fair Britomartis, Chastity. But what on earth does Conrad mean, or Gulnare, or the Bride of Abydos, or even the Childe Harold? We own this senseless contagion extends far. We could almost ask, what the Lady of the Lake means, or Roderick Dhu, or the Elfin Page, or any of the redoubted champions of the North, with the exception perhaps of Sir Marmion. From this last tale we have contrived to pick a moral: the clouds have floated into some imaginary form the carpet, we fear accidentally, has broken the second commandment by giving almost a direct picture: and the regular association we have been able to make, of Sir Marmion's deeds with the actings of a bad conscience, has, we confess, given us an interest in that poem beyond most others of the modern minCHRIST. OBSERV. No. 148. strelsy. Their general tone, which, it must be admitted, Lord Byron has carried to the most extravagant height, seems really to us to be little better than that of "the ideot's tale, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." We have been most usually given to understand that the moral is a most essential part in the structure of a poem. The moral is the first business of the poet, as being the ground-work of his instruction," says Mr. Dryden. And not only do we find this exemplified in the favourite poet of the Faery Queene, who tells us, that "the general end of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline;" but, we believe, scarcely any standard poem, whether of antiquity or of modern times, not excepting the graver productions of the theatre, will be found destitute of this important quality and "general end." We cannot, of course, enter into the limitations, or it may be the exceptions, of this general rule. But we should expect to discover, even in the wildest productions of that wildest of all poets, the inimitable Shakespeare, a certain tendency towards a moral end, a certain predominant maxim throughout the whole, which it might be said to be the uniform design of the poet to inculcate. Turn to still more regular models. Look at the Iliad and the Odyssey, at the Eneid, at the Orlando, the Gerusalemme Liberata, the Paradise Lost, even the Henriade:--what a noble consistency of moral, what a grand pursuit and signal denouement of some instructive sentiment, or some important truth, or some grand exemplar of conduct takes place in each of those finished performances ! And if, as we think Boileau somewhere remarks, even a sonnet should not be composed without some regular and pre-conceived plan; why should not the plan of such a poem as the Corsair of Lord Byron, or the Rokeby of Scott, be made to embrace that most important article 2 L |