throughout all Europe"; as for the birthplace of Homer, cities of Greece had contended for his burial-place; and Athens would have laid her defender in the Temple of Theseus.

II. POEMS

The Prisoner of Chillon was written at Ouchy within two days, June 26 and 27, 1816, the first year of Byron's exile and one of the few most important years of his life. Byron, always alive to the horrors of oppression, had been deeply stirred by the meagre account of the sufferings of Bonnivard, a political prisoner in the Castle of Chillon, and by the sight of the room in which he was confined. "The Château de Chillon is situated between Clarens and Villeneuve, which last is at one extremity of the Lake of Geneva. On its left are the entrances of the Rhone, and opposite are the heights of Meillerie, and the range of Alps above Boveret and St. Gingo. Near it, on a hill behind, is a torrent: below it, washing its walls, the lake has been fathomed to the depth of 800 feet, French measure: within it are a range of dungeons, in which the early reformers, and subsequently prisoners of state, were confined. Across one of the vaults is a beam black with age, on which we were informed that the condemned were formerly executed. In the cells are seven pillars, or, rather, eight, one being half merged in the wall; in some of these are rings for the fetters and the fettered: in the pavement the steps of Bonnivard have left their traces. He was confined here several years.

SELECTIONS 2

...

The Château is large, and seen along the lake for a great distance. The walls are white."

You cannot better study the processes of a poet's mind in a work of this kind than by comparing these matterof-fact details with the poem. In any good encyclopædia or annotated edition of Byron you will find material, which you may well use, for further comparison; and your teachers will no doubt put you in the way of seeing some of the many photographs of Chillon and the Lake of Geneva.

The poem is written in a quieter, more chastened spirit than was common with Byron, and it is of superior form to his earlier short narratives. In fact, not only do The Prisoner and Mazeppa proceed almost wholly without digression, but their sheer speed of narrative is what Byron never attained in his longer pieces and rarely even in his shorter ones. This means also, of course, that scenery, on which Byron and other romantic poets are prone to insist too much, is here fleeting, incidental, strictly subordinate to the story and the impression it gives of Bonnivard. Yet the work would scarcely be Byron's if, concerned with outdoors at all, it did not contain some memorable picture. And indeed the one landscape in The Prisoner not only gains by isolation and contrast, but it is one of those triumphs of art in which much is shown in strokes as few as they are secure. Bonnivard, having ascended to his barred windows to catch sight of the mountains again, says, in lines that have been often quoted and that will be quoted many times in the future

"I saw them - and they were the same,
They were not changed like me in frame;
I saw their thousand years of snow

On high- their wide long lake below,
And the blue Rhone in fullest flow;
I heard the torrents leap and gush
O'er channelled rock and broken bush;
I saw the white-walled distant town,
And whiter sails go skimming down;
And then there was a little isle,
Which in my very face did smile,
The only one in view;

A small green isle, it seemed no more,
Scarce broader than my dungeon floor,
But in it there were three tall trees,
And o'er it blew the mountain breeze,
And by it there were waters flowing,

And on it there were young flowers growing,
Of gentle breath and hue."

As definite, you see, as Elim, with its palm trees and its wells of water, in the Book of Exodus. And these lines, so far from breaking the unity of the poem, serve to strengthen it and to deepen the pathos of the whole. The passion and pathos of The Prisoner of Chillon are cumulative in their effect, and grow through the account of the prisoner himself, and of the deaths of his brothers beside him; of the madness of the prisoner, followed by despair; of the bird's song, coming suddenly on his solitude and desolation; of his final state, when long imprisonment has made him unfit for freedom. The fine sonnet, beginning

"Eternal spirit of the chainless Mind,"

which would be impressive by itself, both gains and gives by being used as introduction to the narrative.

Mazeppa has for introduction the lines in which Byron, following the facts briefly stated by Voltaire in his history of Charles XII of Sweden, relates the hardships and adventures of Charles after the disastrous battle of Pultowa, on July 8, 1709. The poet represents Mazeppa, then Prince of Ukrania and an old man, as endeavouring to cheer the king with the account of his wild and terrible ride when he was a young man. Here, also, Byron took his hint — no more - from Voltaire. Mazeppa, published in 1819, was a reversion to the manner that Byron got from Scott, and now used with surer effect than at first. After the ride once begins, Mazeppa is rapid and fiery to the end, and the episode of the wolves is as preternaturally vivid as anything in Tam o' Shanter. Indeed, notwithstanding the length of the work, you will at once see a kinship between Mazeppa's ride and the rides of Tam o' Shanter, Paul Revere, and Browning's unnamed hero who rode from Ghent to Aix. The swift, uninterrupted movement is for most readers the main interest, and for many readers the only interest, in verses of this sort. Yet Byron's narrative, like Browning's, is helped to reality by the rapid succession of objects that take the rider's eye. The steed, the wolves, the stream, the wood, the coming sun, the "thousand horse and none to ride," are all a part of your experience while you read, as they were of Mazeppa's while

he rode. Movement and vision hurry on together in the strong, rushing verse.

The Byron of these two episodic poems is, of course, not the Byron whose genius set all Europe on fire. But The Prisoner and Mazeppa, like everything else from his pen, were eagerly read, and did not lack comfort for despairing lovers of freedom on a continent where, not without help from free England, the old despotisms were everywhere being re-established.

Texts.

III. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Works: Poetry, ed. E. H. Coleridge (7 vols. London, 1898-1904); Letters and Journals, ed. R. E. Prothero (6 vols. London, 1898-1901). Selections, with essay by Matthew Arnold, in Golden Treasury Series; Selections, ed. F. I. Carpenter; Letters, in Camelot Series.

Biography and Criticism. — Life, by J. Nichol (English Men of Letters); Life, by R. Noel (Great Writers); Essays, by T. B. Macaulay; by W. Hazlitt (The Spirit of the Age).