one of the Christabel,' of which it is a objects which bear the poet aloft on 'Come we now from the Castle of C Ber. wretched. Stay, gentle lady, I would somewhat with thee.. (Imogine retreats terrified) There was a voice which all the world, but thee, Imo. My senses blaze--between the dead and and makes a full declaration with all Pray, when thou tell'st thy beads, for one more the bitterness and rage of disappointed passion, and his deadly hate towards St. Aldobrand, and determined purpose of destroying him. He is made acquainted with the temporary absence of his enemy, then with the Knights of St. Anselm. Upon learning this he expresses a horrid joy, considering the opportunity is now arrived of satiating his vengeance. He goes to the castle of St. Aldobrand, where his followers are feasted. His interview with Imogine, and the dire impressions on his mind when the full disclosure of her situation is made to him, are exhibited in a scene of great tragic pathos and terror; and, in justice to the poet, we will here place it before the reader. moner Ber. The wealth of worlds were heaped on Imo. Oh then I read thy loss-thy heart is sunk "Yet if I could collect my faltering breath Imo. Strange is thy form, but more thy words Fearful it seems to hold this parley with thee. Ber. What avails it? The wretched have no country: that dear name Imo. I shake to hear him-- I burnt features stand in fear-oh God!-it cannot be————— Ber. Imogine-(she has tottered towards him during the last speech, and when he utters her name, shrieks and falls into his arms.) Ber. Imogine-yes, To be enfolded to this desolate heart Thus pale, cold, dying, thus thou art most fit Nay, look not up, 'tis thus I would behold thee, Oh God ! Why do I find thee in mine enemy's walls? What dost thou in the halls of Aldobrand! Thou canst not be-my throat is swoln with Hell hath no plague-Oh no, thou couldst not do it. Imo. "(kneeling)" Mercy. Ber. Thou hast it not, or thou wouldst speak→→ Imo. am the wife of Aldobrand,- Ber. I will not curse her---but the hoarded ven- Imo. Aye---curse, and consummate the horrid For broken-hearted, in despairing hour me, Full were the rites of horror and despair. As I have loved? "the veriest wretch on Nor food, nor fire, nor raiment, and his child Or wed with him---or---see thy father perish. not Though thou hast made me, woman, very wretched Though thou hast made me---but I will not curse thee Hear the last prayer of Bertram's broken heart, Of thy rank wishes the full scope be on thee--- ness-- May he thou'st wed, be kind and generous to thee, Bertram extorts a promise from Imogine to meet him under the castle walls, and yield him an hour's intercourse. The appointment is kept, and in a wretched moment the stain of guilt is added to the sorrows of the unhappy wife. Immediately after the parting, Bertram hears that Lord Aldobrand had received a commission from his sovereign to hunt down the outlawed Bertram. From this moment he forms an inexorable determination to murder (for whatever gloss is given to the act, in reference to the manner, place, and time of doing it, no other name could properly describe it) his devoted ene my. His horrid purpose is declared to the wretched wife, whose pitiable and mad despair, on being unable to move him from his purpose, is certainly a most distressing picture of female anguish. The murder is committed; and all that succeeds is the utter misery, madness, and death of Imogine, and the death of the Count by his own hands. • That there is much deep distress in rable force in the expression of feeling the story of this tragedy, very consideand passion, and both vigour and beauty in the imagery and diction, we are very ready to admit; but in dignity, propriety, consistency, and contrast, in the finer movements of virtuous tenderness, the delicacies of female sensibility, the conflict of struggling emotions, heroical elevation of sentiment, and moral sublimity of action, this play is extremely deficient. The hero is that same mischievous compound of attractiveness and turpitude, of love and crime, of chivalry and brutality, which in the poems of Lord Byron and his imitators has been too long successful in captivating weak fancies and outraging moral truth. Let but your hero be well-favoured, wo-begone, mysterious, desperately brave, and, above (Bertram, p. 25---30. all, desperately in love, and the interAt the next meeting of this luckless est of the female reader is too apt to be pair, which is at the convent of St. secured in his behalf, however bloody, Anselm, after much painful conflict, dark, and revengeful, however hostile ness, Writhe in detesting consciousness of falsehood--- Who cannot love the father of her child, thee, May ruined Bertram's pledge hiss in thine ear Joy to the proud dame of St. Aldrobrand--- towers. towards God and man, he may display fatigue of a journey. All this he rehimself in his principles and actions. The solves, and the deed is done, without whole theory and secret of this poeti- any tender visitings of nature, and with cal philosophy is amusingly detailed in less compunction or conflict in his bothe epilogue to the piece, from which, som than Milton's devil expressed on small as is our general esteem for these the eve of destroying the felicity of literary performances, we must, for the Paradise. And yet, says the epilogue, sake of the profound ethical maxims it in apology for all this, contains, exhibit an extract to the reader. "Bertram! ye cry, a ruthless blood-stain'd rover! He was but also was the truest lover! We will present to our readers the scene which takes place between the lovers after that act of shame by which the mother, wife, and woman, were for ever lost. Enter BERTRAM. "It is a crime in me to look on thee- Fly, while my lips without a crime may wara Would thou hadst never come, or sooner parted.. Why comest thou thus ?" what is thy fearful busi- I know thou comest for evil, but its purport Ber. Guess it, and spare me." (a long pause, "Imo. I dare not; there; But what my fears do indistinctly guess Ber. Dost thou not hear it in my very silence? "That which no voice can tell, doth tell itself. Imo. My harassed thought hath not one point of fear, Save that it must not think." 'The cardinal crime on which the story turns is the fatal act of infidelity committed under the walls of the castle of Aldobrand. And this crime is proposed and assented to by the contract. ing parties, in a manner as little consistent with common modesty in woman, and common generosity in man, as can well be imagined. But if that which ought most to soften a man towards the sufferings of a woman be the consciousness that he himself has been the cause of it, then is this Bertram one of the worst specimens of a man and a soldier that we have yet encountered in the course of our experience. After crop- "I will arouse the castle, rouse the dead, ping this fair flower, he treads it under To save my husband; villain, murderer, monfoot, and scatters in the dust its blasted Dare the bayed lioness, but fly from me. beauty. With ruthless delight, and demoniac malice, he spurns the soft and melting prayers in her husband's behalf, whom he resolves to murder in his own mansion, in the presence or hearing of his wife and child, and, as it seems, while he rests on his couch after the Ber. (throwing his dagger "on the ground”) ster, "Ber. Go, wake the castle with thy frantic cries: Those cries that tell my secret, blazon thine. Yea, pour it on thine husband's blasted ear. mercy. "Ber. No, hope not such a fate of mercy from him; He'll curse thee with his pardon, "And would his death-fixed eye be terrible "A thing that mothers warn their daughters from, "And when the wicked think of, they do triumph; Imo. I must encounter it-I have deserved it; "Begone, or my next cry shall wake the dead. "Ber. Hear me. "Imo. No parley, tempter; fiend, avaunt. "Ber. Thy son.-( "Poor boy! his sire's worst foe might pity him .verse, "Devouring his young heart in loneliness Imo. (falling at his feet) "I am a wretch, but who hath made me so? "I'm writhing like a worm beneath thy spurn." Have pity on me, I have had inuch wrong. Ber. My heart is as the steel within thy grasp. "From my high sphere of purity and peace, blessed Imo. Thou must, "Wouldst have him butchered by their ruffian hands "That wait my bidding? "Imo (falling on the ground)-Fell and hor rible "I'm sealed, shut down in ransomless perdition. "He shall fall nobly, by my hand shall fall- Ill as the lady Imogine was used by her sanguinary and brutal lover, we cannot say that her own character is such as to entitle her to much respect. The author has endeavoured in a very lame manner to support her constancy in the present instance clumsily enough by the pretext, not a very new one, and inserted, of a starving parent whose life was saved by the sacrifice; and after this first sacrifice to convenience or exigency, not unlike those which, in the coarse arrangements of ordinary life, parents are apt to require of their daughters, and daughters are apt very cheerfully to submit to, she makes another voluntary sacrifice of her honour, her husband, and her child, to another sort of convenience or exigency which is created by the urgency of nature or the stress of passion. The events are of ordinary occurrence and of ephemeral frequency in vicious society; and though the author has raised them to tragic dignity by his manner of telling “For I am strong in woes"—I ne'er reproached and describing them, and the vivacious thee "I plead but with my agonies and tears-" By heaven" and all its host," he shall not perish. live. "This is no transient flash of fugitive passion"His death hath been my life for years of misery "Which else I had not lived "Upon that thought, and not on food, I fed; "I come to do the deed that must be done me." Imo. "But man shall, miscreant"-help! The armed vassals all are far from succour 44 Following St. Anselm's votarists to the con vent-" My band of blood are darkening in theit halls touches of a very glowing pencil, yet the real substratum of the tale is one of those turbulent triumphs of passion over duty, which mar the peace of families and make the practicers in Doctors' Commons. That this murderous fellow of a count interest our sympathies, is but too apis meant to engage our admiration and parent. After Bertram has revealed to the Prior his bloody trade as the leader of a banditti, and his yet more horrible purposes, the holy man, as he is called, thus addresses him : Prior. High-hearted man, sublime even in thy guile. And again, after the horrible murder, which certainly had as little sublimity |