"Thro' the crevice where it came,
That bird was perch'd, as fond and tame,
And tamer than upon the tree;
A lovely bird, with azure wings,
And song that said a thousand things,
And seem'd to say them all for me!"
(_The Prisoner of Chillon._)
or, looking backwards through a score of centuries,
I see before me the Gladiator lie:
He leans upon his hand--his manly brow
Consents to death, but conquers agony,
And his droop'd head sinks gradually low--
And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow
From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one,
Like the first of a thunder-shower; and now
The arena swims around him--he is gone,
Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hail'd the wretch who won.
Byron is emphatically a citizen of the world, who has "not only painted
the environs, but reflected the passions and aspirations of every scene
which he visualizes." And it is this magic power of conveying the
authentic impression of an actual occurrence, which renders his most
recondite situations so thrilling,--which breathes a Western vigour into
the scented air of the Orient, and thrills with poignant pathos through
the horrors of the _Prisoner of Chillon_.
A light broke in upon my brain--
It was the carol of a bird;
It ceased, and then it came again,
The sweetest song ear ever heard:
And mine was thankful till my eyes
Ran over with the glad surprise,
And they that moment could not see
I was the mate of misery;
But then by dull degrees came back
My senses to their wonted track;
I saw the dungeon walls and floor
Close slowly round me as before,
I saw the glimmer of the sun
Creeping as it before had done;
But through the crevice where it came
That bird was perch'd, as fond and tame,
And tamer than upon the tree;
A lovely bird, with azure wings,
And song that said a thousand things,
And seem'd to say them all for me!
I never saw its like before,
I ne'er shall see its likeness more:
It seem'd like me to want a mate,
But was not half so desolate,
And it was come to love me when
None lived to love me so again,
And cheering from my dungeon's brink,
Had brought me back to feel and think.
I know not if it late were free,
Or broke its cage to perch on mine,
But knowing well captivity,
Sweet bird! I could not wish for thine!
Or if it were, in winged guise,
A visitant from Paradise;
For--Heaven forgive that thought! the while
Which made me both to weep and smile--
I sometimes deem'd that it might be
My brother's soul come down to me;
But then at last away it flew,
And then 'twas mortal well I knew,
For he would never thus have flown,
And left me twice so doubly lone,
Lone as the corse within its shroud,
Lone as a solitary cloud,--
A single cloud on a sunny day,
While all the rest of heaven is clear,
A frown upon the atmosphere,
That hath no business to appear
When skies are blue, and earth is gay.
(_The Prisoner of Chillon._)
Unhappily, all these shifting scenes of imagination or experience--so
the poet has made mournful confession--have little power to wean him
from himself. "Neither the music of the shepherd, the crashing of the
avalanche, nor the torrent, the mountain, the glacier, the forest, nor
the cloud, have for one moment lightened the weight upon my heart, nor
enabled me to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty, and the
power, and the glory, above, around, and beneath me."
And although, it will be noticed, he exempts the sea--and although the
blood of old sea-kings, running fiercely in his veins, still kindles him
to imperishable rapture in its presence,--
And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy
Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be
Borne, like thy bubbles, onward: from a boy
I wanton'd with thy breakers--they to me
Were a delight; and if the freshening sea
Made them a terror--'twas a pleasing fear,
For I was as it were a child of thee,
And trusted to thy billows far and near,
And laid my hand upon thy mane--as I do here.
(_Childe Harold._)
--yet there is sorrow on the sea itself,--the "unplumb'd, salt, estranging
sea" which separates him from his mother-country. Cosmopolitan as he
is, self-banished exile, quick with Greek and Italian sympathies,
Byron never for one moment forgets that he is head of one of England's
proudest families. Despite his scathing scorn towards his fair-weather
London friends, towards the unreasoning outbursts of malignity which
drove him out of his England--with all her faults, he loves her still.
He vaguely hopes and hankers after a return to those long-lost shores:
and endeavours to believe that the future will in some way make atonement
for all the calamities of the past.
But now Shelley, Williams, Medwin, and Taafe are dismounting in the pine
forest, and the men-servants setting up the target. Pistol-practice
is Byron's forte; when he hits a half-crown at twelve yards he is as
delighted as a boy, and quite glum and disconcerted if he should happen
to miss. This very rarely happens, as he is a crack shot, easily
distancing the other competitors. His hand trembles violently, but he
calculates on this vibration, and, depending entirely on his eye, hardly
ever fails. After about an hour's shooting, the light begins to wane
towards sunset: and the friends ride back to the city, Byron in exuberant
good humour with himself and everybody else. Arrived at the Palazzo
Lanfranchi, he finds two guests awaiting him,--Count Pietro Gamba,
brother of the lovely Contessa Guiccioli, and Trelawny, that handsome,
picturesque, piratical-looking "Younger Son," who has not yet published
to an astonished world his remarkable and almost incredible "Adventures."
Trelawny is at present in command of Byron's yacht the _Bolivar_, lying
in the harbour of Genoa.
The poet welcomes these new additions to his company: for, since his
arrival in Pisa, he has begun to entertain men at dinner-parties, for
the first time since leaving England. A very cheerful company sits down
with him to dinner: their host displays himself to great advantage,
"being at once," to quote Shelley, "polite and cordial, full of social
hilarity and the most perfect good humour, never diverging into
ungraceful merriment, and yet keeping up the spirit of liveliness
throughout the evening." Byron, according to his own declaration, has
never passed two hours in mixed society without wishing himself out of
it again. Nobody, however, could guess at this fact from his bright,
frank, and spontaneous gaiety. Always an abstemious eater--"I have fed
at times for over two months together," he assures his friends, "on
sheer biscuit and water,"--very little food suffices him: and besides,
_bien entendu_, he is anxious to retain that "happy slenderness" on
which he prides himself,--the slenderness which is a characteristic
of his family, and which he has recently endangered by a lazy life in
Venice. The guests sit fascinated by his enthralling personality: they
recognize that he wears a natural greatness which "his errors can only
half obscure:" and they rivet their gaze upon that pale and splendid
face, the only one, as Scott says, that ever came up to an artist's
notion of what the lineaments of a poet should be. He looks around
him upon the ethereal and feminine countenance of Shelley, the
visionary,--the kind, pleasant, honest English faces of Medwin and
Williams,--the good-looking Italian Gamba, the quaint little Irishman
Taafe,--last, not least, the dark mustachios and wildly-flashing Celtic
eyes of the Cornish adventurer Trelawny. This latter might well have
served for a model of Conrad the Corsair: and so he is assured by his
companions.
"Sun-burnt his cheek, his forehead high and pale
The sable curls in wild profusion veil....
His features' deepening lines and varying hue
At times attracted, yet perplex'd the view."
[Illustration]