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6

And scarce their foam the pebbles shook,
But murmur'd meekly as the brook.
The winds were pillow'd on the waves;
The banners drooped along their staves,
And, as they fell around them furling,
Above them shone the crescent curling;
And that deep silence was unbroke,
Save where the watch his signal spoke,
Save where the steed neigh'd oft and shrill, -
And echo answered from the hill,

And the wide hum of that wild host
Rustled like leaves from coast to coast,
As rose the Muezzin's voice in air
In midnight call to wonted prayer;
It rose, that chaunted mournful strain,
Like some lone spirit's o'er the plain :
'Twas musical, but sadly sweet,
Such as when winds and harp-strings meet,
And take a long unmeasur'd tone,
To mortal minstrelsy unknown.
It seemed to those within the wall
A cry prophetic of their fall:
It struck even the besieger's ear
With something ominous and drear,
And undefined and sudden thrill,
Which makes the heart a moment still,
Then beat with quicker pulse, ashamed
Of that strange sense it's silence framed,
Such as a sudden passing bell

Wakes, though but for a stranger's knell.' Stanza xi.

The poem ought to commence with these lines: what precedes them may be gathered from the sequel. Alp, a renegade, the convert of revenge,' is leading on the Turkish host against Corinth; a breach has been effected in the walls, and the morrow is fixed for taking the town by storm. The classic scenery of the tale adds considerably to the beauty and interest of the poem: the description of the snow-clad summit of Delphi, is particularly fine. The renegade, unable to sleep, is represented wandering on the beach, till he arrives within a carbine's reach of the leaguered city, and sees

-the lean dogs beneath the wall

Hold o'er the dead their carnival.'

The following lines describe, with horrible minuteness, the disgusting spectacle, which the Author assures us, he himself beheld under the walls of the Seraglio at Constantinople. What follows is quite in the spirit of our Author; it is exceedingly touching.

• Alp turn'd him from the sickening sight: Never had shaken his nerves in fight;

But he better could brook to behold the dying,
Deep in the tide of their warm blood lying,
Scorch'd with the death-thirst, and writhing in vain,
Than the perishing dead who are past all pain.
There is something of pride in the perilous hour,
Whate'er be the shape in which death may lower;
For Fame is there to say who bleeds,

And Honour's eye on daring deeds!

But when all is past, it is humbling to tread
O'er the weltering field of the tombless dead,
And see worms of the earth, and fowls of the air,
Beasts of the forest, all gathering there;
All regarding man as their prey,

All rejoicing in his decay.

There is a temple in ruin stands,
Fashioned by long forgotten hands;
Two or three columns, and many a stone,
Marble and granite, with grass o'er grown!
Out upon Time! it will leave no more
Of the things to come than the things before!
Out upon Time! who for ever will leave

But enough of the past for the future to grieve

O'er that which hath been, and o'er that which must be:
What we have seen, our sons shall see;

Remnants of things that have passed away,

Fragments of stone, reared by creatures of clay !'

pp. 27-28.

The scene between Alp and Francesca is equal to any thing of the sort that we remember to have read. We prefer giving as specimens, passages which will better admit of being detached from the story, but we are tempted to particularize the following lines in the description of the Venetian maid, as being eminently happy.

He looked on the face, and beheld its hue
So deeply changed from what he knew:

Fair but faint--without the ray

Of mind, that made each feature play
Like sparkling waves on a sunny day:
And her motionless lips lay still as death,
And her words came forth without her breath,
And there rose not a heave o'er her bosom's swell,
And there seemed not a pulse in her veins to dwell.
Though her eye shone out, yet the lids were fixed,
And the glance that it gave was wild and unmixed
With aught of change, as the eyes may seem
Of the restless who walk in a troubled dream;
Like the figures on arras, that gloomily glare
Stirred by the breath of the wintry air.' p. 33.

The simile in the last couplet, is pursued to too great a

length, a defect often chargeable on Lord Byron's otherwise beautiful similes.

Corinth is taken: a gallant remnant of the Venetian garrison retain for some time the possession of a church, but the gates yield at length to the overwhelming force of the 'Mussulman,' and murder and sacrilege go forward.

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• Minotti lifted his aged eye,

And made the sign of a cross with a sigh,
Then seized a torch which blazed thereby;
And still he stood, while, with steel and flame,
Inward and onward the Mussulman came.

The vaults beneath the Mosaic stone
Contained the dead of ages gone:
Their names were on the graven floor,
But now illegible with gore,

The carved crests, and curious hues
The varied marble's veins diffuse,

Were smeared, and slippery-stained, and strown

With broken swords, and helms o'erthrown:

There were dead above, and the dead below

Lay cold in many a coffined row;

You might see them piled in sable state,
By a pale light through a gloomy grate;
But War had entered their dark caves,
And stored along the vaulted graves
Her sulphurous treasures, thickly spread
In masses by the fleshless dead:
Here, throughout the siege had been
The Christian's chiefest magazine;
To these a late-formed train now led,
Minotti's last and stern resource
Against the foe's o'erwhelming force.

The foe came on, and few remain
To strive, and those must strive in vain:
For lack of further lives, to slake
The thirst of vengeance now awake,
With barbarous blows they gash the dead,
And lop the already lifeless head,

And fell the statues from their niche,
And spoil the shrines of offerings rich,
And from each other's rude hands wrest
The silver vessels saints had blessed.
To the high altar now they go;
Oh, but it made a glorious show!
On its table still behold.

The cup of consecrated gold;
Massy and deep, a glittering prize,

Brightly it sparkles to plunderers' eyes :

That morn it held the holy wine,

Converted by Christ to his blood so divine,

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Which his worshippers drank at the break of day,
To shrive their souls ere they joined in the fray,
Still a few drops within it lay,

And round the sacred table glow
Twelve lofty lamps, in splendid row,
From the purest metal cast;

A spoil the richest and the Jast.

So near they came, the nearest stretched
To grasp the spoil he almost reached,
When old Minotti's hand

Touched with the torch the train

'Tis fired!

Spire, vaults, the shrine, the spoil, the slain,
The turban'd victors, the Christian band,
All that of living or dead remain,
Hurled on high with the shivered fane,
In one wild roar expired!

The shattered town-the walls thrown down-
The waves a moment backward bent-

The hills that shake, although unrent,
As if an earthquake passed-

The thousand shapeless things all driven
In cloud and flame athwart the heaven,
By that tremendous blast-

Proclaimed the desperate conflict o'er

On that too long afflicted shore.' pp. 49-52.

There are some obvious marks of carelessness in these lines. We know not how all that of dead remained,' could expire in that wild roar.' It may possibly occur also to some dry reader of his Lordship's minutely circumstantial detail of the catastrophe, to inquire whether the original record was furnished by an eye-witness.

'The Poem concludes with a minute, and, in some parts, lowering description of the effects of the catastrophe. From the beginning of the eleventh stanza, however, to the close, the spirit of the poem is sustained in a style quite equal to any of his Lordship's former poems.

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We shall say little of "Parisina." It is not deficient in merit. The first stanza, which has appeared before in a different form, is very beautiful; and we might select several other fine passages. His Lordship will set us down among the fastidious objectors to such stories, which he deems sufficiently authorized by the Greek Dramatists and some of the best of our old English writers'. Our objections, however, originate rather in taste than respect for morality. The subject of the tale is purely unpleasing, and the manner in which it is treated, does not tend to reconcile us to it. The use which was made of facts or fables of this sort, by our old dramatic writers, was, VOL. V. N. S.

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to afford occasion for the development of character, or to im-. part a mysterious interest to the plot. In Lord Byron's poem of Parisina, there is neither plot nor character. The story is given in the nakedness of history. A hundred similar stories, as gross and as revolting, might doubtless be extracted from the domestic histories of feudal times: but what moral emotion-not to speak of any moral end-are they calculated to excite, when imbodied in confessedly beautiful poetry? A contemporary writer has adopted a story remarkably similar to that of Parisina, as the ground work of a poem recently published, and which we shall speedily notice; but, in this poem, the circumstances are such as conspire to affect us strongly with pity, and the impression left on the mind, is that of calm and gentle melancholy. The impression left by Parisina, on the contrary, if we may judge from what it made on our minds, is simply painful, involving a dissatisfaction with the issue of the story, with the conduct of the judge equally with that of the culprit; a shrinking sensation of horror at the details of the catastrophe, and a degree of surprise that a man with any pretensions to sensibility should have taken pleasure in realizing and expatiating, to so little moral purpose, on an obscure portion of history of so revolting a character. We do not now speak of the tendency of the narration, but only remark that the power of his Lordship's poetry is inadequate to overcome, or even considerably to temper, the painful impression which it leaves.

It is surely a singular circumstance, that Lord Byron has hitherto confined himself to the narration of crime, and to the delineation of vicious character. His spirited sketches, for they are after all sketches, exquisitely spirited and powerful, but nothing more, are all devoted to the illustration of the energies of evil. This certainly evinces either a great deficiency of taste, or very limited powers of conception. The gloomy phantasmagoria of his pencil, though differing in form and costume, are all of one character, or rather of one cast; for the sentiments and feelings which Lord Byron attributes to the personages in his poems, do not constitute them characters. There is no individuality of feature in his portraits. He describes admirably a certain class of emotions; but these should have been imbodied in character, rather than described; and his characters should have been developed by their actions. As there is no individuality in his conceptions, so there is little variety. It should seem that one strongly imagined personification had taken possession of the poet's mind, so that whatever be the scene or the story, this ideal actor is still the hero of the drama.

We are far from depreciating Lord Byron's genius. In energy of expression, and in the power of giving to words

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