And his eyes like embers glowing
In the darkness of the night,
And his pace as swift as light.

Look-how round his straining throat
Grace and shifting beauty float;
Sinewy strength is in his reins,

And the red blood gallops through his veins;
Richer, redder, never ran

Through the boasting heart of man.

He can trace his lineage higher
Than the Bourbon dare aspire-
Douglas, Guzman, or the Guelph,
Or O'Brien's blood itself!

He, who hath no peer, was born
Here, upon a red March morn;
But his famous fathers dead
Were Arabs all, and Arab-bred,
And the last of that great line
Trod like one of a race divine!
And yet, he was but friend to one,
Who fed him at the set of sun

By some lone fountain fringed with green;
With him, a roving Bedouin,

He lived (none else would he obey
Through all the hot Arabian day)
And died untamed upon the sands
Where Balkh amidst the desert stands!

A Petition to Time

This lyric was written on the poet's arrival in America. It touched the heart of the people, and the newspapers carried it to all firesides.

I'

OUCH us gently, Time!

Let us glide adown thy stream

Gently as we sometimes glide

Through a quiet dream!

Humble voyagers are We,

Husband, wife and children three

(One is lost-an angel, fled

To the azure overhead!)

Touch us gently, Time!

We've not proud nor soaring wings;
Our ambition, our content

Lies in simple things.

Humble voyagers are We,
O'er Life's dim unsounded sea,
Seeking only some calm clime:
Touch us gently, gentle Time!

The Owl

'N the hollow tree, in the old gray tower,
The spectral owl doth dwell;

Dull, hated, despised, in the sunshine hour,

But at dusk he's abroad and well!

Not a bird of the forest e'er mates with him;

All mock him outright by day;

But at night, when the woods grow still and dim, The boldest will shrink away!

O, when the night falls, and roosts the fowl,
Then, then, is the reign of the horned owl!

And the owl hath a bride, who is fond and bold, And loveth the wood's deep gloom;

And, with eyes like the shine of the moonstone cold,
She awaiteth her ghastly groom:

Not a feather she moves, not a carol she sings,
As she waits in her tree so still;

But when her heart heareth his flapping wings,
She hoots out her welcome shrill!

O, when the moon shines, and dogs do howl,
Then, then, is the joy of the horned owl!

Mourn not for the owl, nor his gloomy plight!
The owl hath his share of good:

If a prisoner he be in the broad daylight,
He is lord in the dark greenwood!

Nor lonely the bird, nor his ghastly mate,
They are each unto each a pride:

Thrice fonder, perhaps, since a strange, dark fate
Hath rent them from all beside!

So when the night falls, and dogs do howl,
Sing, ho! for the reign of the horned owl!

We know not alway

Who are kings by day,

But the king of the night is the bold brown ow!!

GEORGE GORDON BYRON, LORD BYRON ENGLAND, 1788-1824

SOM

OME early verses which Byron published in 1806 were suppressed. They were followed in 1807 by Hours of Idleness, which was savagely attacked by the Edinburgh Review. His reply was the English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, a masterpiece of satirical nomenclature. At this time, Byron left England, and during an absence of two years wrote the first two cantos of Childe Harold, which were published in 1812 and were received with acclamation. In his own words, he awoke one morning and found himself famous. This poem, here and there ablaze with Nature-her storms, her shadows, her serenities; and the sentiment, now morbid, now jubilant —is always his own, though it beguiles with honeyed passages or stabs like a knife. His Don Juan, the first two cantos of which have been described as his masterpiece, followed in 1819 and was hailed with mingled abuse and acclaim. It has questionable passages: he sometimes enspheres a villain in a blaze of diction.

As a boy I was, like Tennyson, an enormous admirer of Byron. Tennyson says: "I was fourteen when I heard of his death. It seemed an awful calamity; I remember I rushed out of doors, sat down by myself, shouted aloud, and wrote on the standstone: 'Byron is dead!"

Byron's final position in English literature is not yet wholly settled. His fame was at its apex in his own generation. Yet his energy, passion, and power of vivid, richly-colored description, together with the interest attaching to his romantic career, must always make him loom large among English writers.

Taine tells us that "Byron does not invent, he observes; he does not create, he transcribes." His poetry is the exposition of his own sorrows, his own revolts, his own

dreams. Thus it can be said that he projected over Europe "the pageant of his bleeding heart."

Life was to him fever and torture: he knew "the worm, the canker and the grief." He was a stormy spirit— all originality and volcanic energy-a tumultuous genius, not so much a poet of the individual as a poet of the universe. And all his stormy passion is voiced in a style that is free, intense, affluent, dynamic, melodious.

Browning and Carlyle were of the same mind in predicting that Byron would have been a poet of the noblest and highest order had he lived a few years longer. As it is, his poetry reveals an unbridled satirist and a man of sentiment, an aristocrat and a radical, an exponent of sublimity and sensuality-"half dust, half deity"-to use his own phrase. The key to his eccentricities is to be found in his heredity, his disordered life, his headlong passions. But he also had nobilities in him. The Italian patriot Mazzini bears this testimony: "The day will come when Democracy will remember all that it owes to Byron. . . . From him dates the sympathy of all the true-hearted amongst us for this land of liberty, whose true vocation he so worthily represented among the oppressed."