the attitude that one human creature would care for in another human creature. It drove Byron perfectly wild, as it would have driven many another man. "Lady Byron," says the witness we have already quoted, "took seriously every word he uttered, weighed it in her precise balance, and could not refrain from expressing her condemnation of his language and her abhorrence of his principles. This fanned the flame, increased his irritation, or added gist to his amusement. Whatever crime she accused him of he was not only ready to admit, but even to trump by the confession of some greater enormity." We all know the result: she left him when living, and slandered him when dead. Read once more the last stanza of the lines from Shelley we have already cited:

"Some might lament that I were cold,

And I, when this sweet day is gone,
Which my lost heart, too soon grown old,
Insults with this untimely moan.

They might lament, for I am one

Whom men love not, and yet regret ;

Unlike this day which, when the sun
Shall on its stainless glory set,

Will linger, though enjoyed, like joy in memory yet."

And then turn to 'Childe Harold,' and note, along with the too-patent superiority of Byron's strain, the strange similitude of prophecy coupled with the awful difference as to realisation:

"But I have lived, and have not lived in vain ;
My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire,
And my frame perish even in conquering pain;
But there is that within me which shall tire
Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire:
Something unearthly which they deem not of,
Like the remembered tones of a mute lyre,
Shall in their softened spirits sink and move,
In hearts all rocky now, the late remorse of love."

The late remorse of love! It never came. Mr. Harness was right. The heart was "all rocky" to the last, and was just as little moved by the remembered tones of Byron's lyre as by its chords when his own living hand swept them. No sooner was he dead than she strove to blast his name and his genius for ever by propagating a story of which Mr. Harness observed, when it reached the ears of the whole world: "I heard the charge long before. It arose out of the publication of 'Manfred.' It is as untrue as it is revolting." Lady Byron told it to scores of people year after year; but none of them believed, and all were too conscientious to repeat it. At length, when years came upon her, and she began to fear that the defaming tale would never be known to the public, she told it to a sensation novelist, and so made its

publication sure. Swallowing the abominable story for a moment, since taken unawares, the public stomach has since vomited it back with unutterable loathing, only a few digestions, which thrive on garbage, retaining it with silent satisfaction. Byron has tired" torture and time," but none the less does it remain a melancholy fact that he found in his wife "the moral Clytemnestra of her lord." Again let us turn to first evidence:

"Madonna, wherefore hast thou sent to me
Sweet-basil and mignonette,

Embleming love and health, which never yet
In the same wreath might be?

Alas! and they are wet!

Is it with thy kisses or thy tears?

For never rain or dew

Such fragrance drew

From plant or flower. The very doubt endears

My sadness ever new,

The sighs I breathe, the tears I shed, for thee?"

Who wrote this?-Shelley? And to whom?-to Mary? Not at all. To Emilia Viviani. And when? In 1821. Her, too, he addresses in these impassioned words, when he pictures

"A veil for our seclusion close as Night's,

Where secure sleep may kill thine innocent lights-
Sleep, the fresh dew of languid love, the rain
Whose drops quench kisses till they burn again.

Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound,
And our veins beat together; and our lips,
With other eloquence than words, eclipse
The soul that burns between them; and the wells
Which boil under our being's inmost cells,
The fountains of our deepest life, shall be
Confused in passion's golden purity,

As mountain springs under the morning sun.
We shall become the same, we shall be one
Spirit within two frames. Oh wherefore two?
One passion in twin hearts, which grows and grew
Till, like two meteors of expanding flame,
Those spheres instinct with it become the same,
Touch, mingle, are transfigured; ever still
Burning, yet ever inconsumable;

In one another's substance finding food,
Like flames too pure and light and unimbued
To nourish their bright lives on the baser prey,
Which point to Heaven, and cannot pass away:
One hope within two wills, one will beneath
Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death,
One heaven, one hell, one immortality,
And one annihilation,

Woe is me!

The winged words on which my soul would pierce
Into the heights of love's rare universe,

Were chains of lead around its flight of fire

I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!"

A recent biographer and editor of Shelley has observed, that if anybody has ever said or insinuated that Shelley's love for the beautiful creature to whom these lines, and a good many more much to the same purpose, were addressed, was other than platonic, the statement is presumably as unworthy of attention as it is incapable of mathematical disproof. With all humility, the writer of this paper is not disposed to yield to Mr. Rossetti in the faculty of following Shelley's ethereal flights, or of appreciating what he calls "a state of feeling which most people have never experienced," and still less to incline with that gentleman to a doubt" whether Epipsychidion '" is quite a justifiable sort of poem to write. 'Epipsychidion' amply justifies itself by its beauty, and there is an end of the matter. But he cannot allow that the insinuation which the above lines themselves convey, that Shelley was in love with Emilia Viviani, not altogether platonically, are "presumably unworthy of attention." The presumption, no matter what the fact might turn out to be, is quite the other way; and that saint of saints, his widow, printed 'Epipsychidion,' as she printed no other of his long poems, without any comment. What would Lady Byron have said or done had Byron written 'Epipsychidion' whilst still living with her? She would have appealed to it as her full justification for abandoning him. We do not say she would not have been right; we are but comparing Byron's lot and Shelley's. "I abstain," writes Mary, "from any remark on the occurrences of Shelley's private life, except inasmuch as the passions they engendered inspired his poetry. This is not the time to relate the truth, and I should reject any colouring of the truth. No account of these events has ever been given at all approaching reality in their details, either as regards himself or others; nor shall I further allude to them than to remark, that the errors of action committed by a man as noble as Shelley may, as far as he only is concerned, be fearlessly avowed by those who loved him, in the firm conviction that, were they judged impartially, his character would stand in fairer and brighter light than that of any contemporary. Whatever faults he had ought to find extenuation among his fellows, since they proved him to be human; without them, the exalted nature of his soul would have raised him into something divine. . . He died, and his place, among those who knew him intimately, has never been filled up . . . Any one, once attached to Shelley, must feel all other affections, however true and fond, as wasted on barren soil in comparison . . . Although the intolerant, in their blindness, poured down anathemas,"-(Shelley was accused, during his

life, of the very same offence which was not openly made against Byron till after his death)-"the Spirit of Good, who can judge the heart, never repelled him . . . The wise, the brave, the gentle, is gone for ever! He is to them as a bright vision, whose radiant track, left behind in the memory, is worth all the realities that society can afford. Before the critics contradict me, let them appeal to any one who had ever known him. To see him was to love him; and his presence, like Ithuriel's spear, was alone sufficient to disclose the falsehood of the tale which his enemies whispered in the ear of the ignorant world." Happy Shelley! To have lived with and been loved by such a woman is so much more than all contemporaneous fame, that we can pity you no more. All our compassion is reserved for him who had, as Macaulay said, the love of lovely women, and the applause of applauded men; but, as we must needs add-first, an unsympathising and finally an implacably hostile wife.

It would be easy, but perhaps here scarcely worth while, to point out minor but not unimportant points of resemblance between Byron and Shelley-such as, for instance, their dislike to animal food; their confirmed habit of relating, and perhaps believing, that to have happened which never happened at all; and finally, their thoroughly well-attested high animal spirits and love of fun, in spite of the profound melancholy by which either was consumed. We must pretermit the proofs of all this, which are abundant, to observe that, in their death as in their life, we can still think of them as, in a sense, twin. Both died young, and both, we may say, not in the course of nature. Shelley heard the sea "breathe o'er his dying brain its last monotony." Byron obtained-"less often sought than found-a soldier's grave." For though he did not die in the very noise of battle, he perished doing soldier's work and seeking a soldier's end. Both deaths were eminently romantic; both-as far as death ever can be-eminently satisfactory.

And their genius? Are we to compare and contrast this likewise? We have not left ourselves room. The task would fill a volume; for neither their similarity nor dissimilarity lies on the surface. To make one broad contrast and leave it, we will say that Shelley's geniusmeaning by genius all that went to form the full and complete man in either case was more in harmony with that invisible world to which, if it have any existence but that which we ourselves give it, Poetry seems to belong, and Byron's genius more in harmony with the visible tangible world in which we move, breathe, and have our being, and in the terms of whose language we must needs express our thoughts. Thus, though, endeavouring to speak judicially, we cannot say that the latent poetical soul of Shelley was less than Byron's, and can quite understand that a person should suspect or believe it to have been even larger, Byron, by dint of that better harmony with carnal conditions

which we have intimated, so managed to incorporate his poetical soul as to be able to show it to us more visibly and conclusively than Shelley. We may therefore reasonably regard them as equal names; but to Byron's works we must perforce concede superiority. M. Taine has justly said, on a recent occasion, that no poetry is equal to English poetry; and we will add that of that poetry-work done, that is— Shakespeare and Byron have produced the best and largest quantity of the best. Let us listen to the two voices-that of Byron and of Shelley. It is Shelley who sings first:

"My soul is an enchanted boat,

Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float
Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing;
And thine doth like an angel sit,

Beside the helm, conducting it,

Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing.

It seems to float ever, for ever,

Upon that many-winding river,
Between mountains, woods, abysses,
A paradise of wildernesses!

Till, like one in slumber bound,

Borne to the ocean, I float down, around,
Into a sea profound of ever-spreading sound.

"Meanwhile thy spirit lifts its pinions
In Music's most serene dominions,
Catching the winds that fan that happy heaven.
And we sail on, away, afar,

Without a course, without a star,

But by the instinct of sweet music driven;
Till, through Elysian garden islets,
By thee, most beautiful of pilots,
Where never mortal pinnace glided,
The boat of my desire is guided:

Realms where the air we breathe is love,

Which in the winds and on the waves doth move,
Harmonizing this earth with what we feel above.

66

'We have passed Age's icy caves,

And Manhood's dark and tossing waves;
And Youth's smooth ocean, smiling to betray:
Beyond the glassy gulfs we flee

Of shadow-peopled Infancy,

Through Death and Birth to a diviner day:

A paradise of vaulted bowers

Lit by downward-gazing flowers,

And watery paths that wind between
Wildernesses calm and green,

Peopled by shapes too bright to see,

And rest, having beheld-somewhat like thee

Which walk upon the sea and chant melodiously."