Imatges de pàgina
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SHELLEY'S DEATH.

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tions that had been dropped by old seamen, who had seen portents of a storm; and his boat sailed away into the covert of the clouds. Next day there were no tidings, nor the next, nor the next. Finally wreck and bodies came to the shore.

Trelawney, Byron's friend, tells a grim story of it all-how the dismal truth was carried to the widowed wife, how the body of the drowned poet was burned upon the shore, with heathen libations of oil and wine; how Byron and Hunt both were present at the weird funeral-the blue Mediterranean lapping peacefully upon the beach and the black smoke lifting in great clouds from the pyre and throwing lurid shadows over the silent company. The burial—such as there was of it-took place in that same Protestant graveyard at Rome - just out of the Porta San Paolo-where we were just now witnesses at the burial of Keats.

Shelley made many friendships, and lasting ones. He was wonderfully generous; he visited the sick; he helped the needy; putting himself often into grievous straits for means to give quickly. As he was fine of figure and of feature, so his voice was fine, delicate, penetrative, yet in

moments of great excitement rising to a shrillness that spoiled melody and rasped the ear; so his finer generosities and kindnesses sometimes passed into a rasping indifference or even cruelty toward those nearest him, he feeling that first Westbrook mesalliance, on occasions, like a torture specially when the presence of the tyrannic, coarse, aggravating sister-in-law was like a poisonous irritant; he-under the teachings of a conscientious father, in his young days-was scarce more than half responsible for his wry life; running to badnesses-on occasions-under good impulses; perhaps marrying that first wife because she wanted to marry him; and quitting her well because "she didn't care. Intel

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lectually, as well as morally, he was pagan; seeing things in their simplest aspects, and so dealing with them; intense, passionate, borne away in tempests of quick decision, whose grounds he cannot fathom; always beating his wings against the cagements that hem us in; eager to look into those depths where light is blinding and will not let us look; seeming at times to measure by some sudden reach of soul what is immeasurable; but

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BYRON AGAIN.

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under the vain uplifts, always reverent, with a dim hope shining fitfully; contemptuous of harassing creeds or any jugglery of forms-of whatever splendid fashionings of mere material, whether robes or rites and yearning to solve by some strong, swift flight of imagination what is insoluble. There are many reverent steps that go to that little Protestant cemetery - an English greenery upon the borders of the Roman Campagna - where the ashes of Shelley rest and where myrtles grow. And from its neighbor

hood, between Mount Aventine and the Janiculan heights, one may see reaches of the gleaming Tiber, and the great dome of St. Peter's lifting against the northern sky, like another tomb, its cross almost hidden in the gray distance.

Pisa and Don Juan.

No such friendship as that whose gleams have shot athwart these latter pages could have been kindled by Byron. No "Adonais" could have been writ for him; he could have melted into no "Adonais" for another; old pirate blood, seething in him, forbade. No wonder he chafed at Hunt's

squalling children in the Lanfranchi palace; that literary partnership finds quick dissolution. He sees on rare occasions an old English friend - he, who has so few! Yet he is in no mood to make new friends. The lambent flames of the Guiccioli romance hover and play about him, making the only counterfeit of a real home which he has ever known. The proud, independent, audacious, lawless living that has been his so long, whether the early charms lie in it or no-he still clings by. His pen has its old force, and the words spin from it in fiery lines; but to pluck the flowers worth the seeking, which he plants in them now, one must go over quaking bogs, and through ways of foulness.

The Childe Harold has been brought to its conclusion long before; its cantos, here and there splendidly ablaze with Nature-its storms, its shadows, its serenities; and the sentiment-now morbid, now jubilant —is always his own, though it beguiles with honeyed sounds, or stabs like a knife.

There have been a multitude of lesser poems, and of dramas which have had their inception

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and their finish on that wild Continental holiday - beginning on Lac Leman and ending at Pisa and Genoa; but his real selfhood- - whether of

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mind or passion seems to me to come out plainer and sharper in the Don Juan than elsewhere. There may not be lifts in it, which rise to the romantic levels of the "Pilgrimage; " there may be lack of those interpolated bits of passion, of gloom, of melancholy, which break into the earlier poem. But there is the blaze and crackle of his own mad march of flame; the soot, the cinders, the heat, the wide-spread ashes, and unrest of those fires which burned in him from the begining were there, and devastated all the virginal purities of his youth (if indeed there were any !) and welded his satanic and his poetic qualities into that seamy, shining, wonderful residue of dirty scoriæ, and of brilliant phosphorescence, which we call Don Juan. From a mere literary point of view there are trails of doggerel in it, which the poet was too indolent to mend, and too proud to exclude. Nor can it ever be done; revised Byron would be not only a Byron emasculated, but decapitated and devastated. "Twould lack the

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