CHAPTER VI.

Our last chapter brought us into the presence of that vivacious specimen of royalty, George IV., who “shuffled off this mortal coil” in the year 1830, and was succeeded by that rough-edged, seafaring brother of his, William IV. This admiral-king was not brilliant; but we found brilliancy--of a sort--in the acute and disputatious essayist, William Hazlitt; yet he was far less companionable than acute, and contrasted most unfavorably with that serene and most worthy gentleman, Hallam, the historian. We next encountered the accomplished and showy Lady Blessington--the type of many a one who throve in those days, and who had caught somewhat of the glitter that radiated from the royal trappings of George the Fourth. We saw Bulwer, among others, in her salon; and we lingered longer over the wonderful career of that Disraeli, who died as Lord Beaconsfield--the most widely known man in Great Britain.

We then passed to a consideration of that other wonderful adventurer--yet the inheritor of an English peerage--who had made his futile beginning in politics, and a larger beginning in poetry. To his career, which was left half-finished, we now recur.

_Lord Byron a Husband._

As we left him--you will remember--there was a jangle of marriage-bells; and a wearisome jangle it proved. Indeed Byron’s marriage-bells were so preposterously out of tune, and lent their discord in such disturbing manner to the whole current of his life, that it may be worth our while to examine briefly the conditions under which the discord began. It is certain that all the gossips of London had been making prey of this match of the poetic hero of the hour for much time before its consummation.

Was he seeking a fortune? Not the least in the world; for though the burden of debt upon his estates was pressing him sorely, and his extravagances were reckless, yet large sums accruing from his swift-written tales of the “Corsair,” “Lara,” and “Bride of Abydos” were left untouched, or lavishly bestowed upon old or new friends; his liberality in those days was most exceptional; nor does it appear that he had any very definite notion of the pecuniary aid which his bride might bring to him. She had, indeed, in her own right, what was a small sum measured by their standards of living; and her expectancies, that might have justified the title of heiress (which he sometimes gives to her in his journal), were then quite remote.

As for social position, there could be by such marriage no gain to him, for whom already the doors of England were flung wide open. Did he seek the reposeful dignity of a home? There may have been such fancies drifting by starts through his mind; but what crude fancies they must have been with a man who had scarcely lived at peace with his own mother, and whose only notion of enjoyment in the house of his ancestors was in the transport to Newstead of a roistering company of boon companions--followed by such boisterous revels there, and such unearthly din and ghostly frolics, as astounded the neighborhood!

The truth is, he marched into that noose of matrimony as he would have ordered a new suit from his tailor. When this whim had first seized him, he had written off formal proposals to Miss Milbanke--whom he knew at that time only slightly; and she, with very proper prudence, was non-committal in her reply--though suggesting friendly correspondence. In his journal of a little later date we have this entry:

“November 30, 1813 [some fourteen months before the marriage]. Yesterday a very pretty letter from Annabella [the full name was Anna Isabella], which I answered. What an odd situation and friendship is ours! Without one spark of love on either side. She is a very superior woman, and very little spoiled … a girl of twenty, an only child and a _savante_, who has always had her own way.”

This evidently does not promise a very ardent correspondence. Nay, it is quite possible that the quiet reserve he encounters here, does offer a refreshing contrast to the heated gush of which he is the subject in that Babel of London; maybe, too, there is something in the reserve and the assured dignity which reminds him of that earlier idol of his worship--Miss Chaworth of Annesley.

However, three months after this last allusion to Miss Milbanke, we have another entry in his journal, running thus:

“January 16, 1814. A wife would be my salvation. I am getting rather into an admiration for C----, youngest sister of F----. [This is not Miss Milbanke--observe.] That she won’t love me is very probable, nor shall I love her. The business would probably be arranged between the papa and me.”

Perhaps it was in allusion to this new caprice that he writes to Moore, a few months later:

“Had Lady ---- appeared to wish it, or even not to oppose it, I would have gone on, and very possibly married, with the same indifference which has frozen over the Black Sea of almost all my passions.… Obstacles the slightest even, stop me.” (_Moore’s Byron_, p. 255.)

And it is in face of some such obstacle, lifting suddenly, that he flashes up, and over, into new proposals to Miss Milbanke; these are quietly accepted--very likely to his wonderment; for he says, in a quick ensuing letter to Moore:

“I certainly did not dream that she was attached to me, which it seems she has been for some time. I also thought her of a very cold disposition, in which I was also mistaken; it is a long story, and I won’t trouble you with it. As to her virtues, and so on, you will hear enough of them (for she is a kind of _pattern_ in the north) without my running into a display on the subject.”

A little over two months after the date of this they were married, and he writes to Murray in the same week:

“The marriage took place on the 2d inst., so pray make haste and congratulate away.” [And to Moore, a few days later.] “I was married this day week. The parson has pronounced it; Perry has announced it, and the _Morning Post_, also, under head of ‘Lord Byron’s marriage’--as if it were a fabrication and the puff direct of a new stay-maker.”

A month and a half later, in another Moore letter, alluding to the death of the Duke of Dorset (an old friend of his), he says:

“There was a time in my life when this event would have broken my heart; and all I can say for it now is--that it isn’t worth breaking.”

Two more citations, and I shall have done with this extraordinary record. In March, 1815 (the marriage having occurred in January), he writes to Moore from the house of his father-in-law, Sir Ralph Milbanke--a little northward of the Tees, in County Durham:

“I am in such a state of sameness and stagnation, and so totally occupied in consuming the fruits, and sauntering, and playing dull games at cards, and yawning, and trying to read old _Annual Registers_ and the daily papers, and gathering shells on the shore, and watching the growth of stunted gooseberries in the garden, that I have neither time nor sense to say more than yours ever--B.”

_A Stay in London._

On leaving the country for a new residence in London, his growing cheer and spirits are very manifest:

“I have been very comfortable here. Bell is in health, and unvaried good humor. But we are all in the agonies of packing.… I suppose by this hour to-morrow I shall be stuck in the chariot with my chin upon a band-box. I have prepared, however, another carriage for the abigail, and all the trumpery which our wives drag along with them.”

Well, there follows a year or more of this coupled life--with what clashings we can imagine. Old Ralph Milbanke is not there to drawl through his after-dinner stories, and to intrude his restraining presence. The poet finds things to watch about the clubs and the theatres--quite other than the stunted gooseberries that grew in his father-in-law’s garden. Nothing is more sure than that the wilful audacities, and selfishness, and temper of the poet, put my lady’s repose and dignities and perfection to an awful strain. Nor is it to be wondered at, if the mad and wild indiscretions of the husband should have provoked some quiet and galling counter indiscretions on the part of her ladyship.

It is alleged, for instance, that on an early occasion--and at the suggestion of a lady companion of the august mistress--there was an inspection of my lord’s private papers, and a sending home to their writers of certain highly perfumed notelets found therein; and we can readily believe that when this instance of wifely zeal came to his lordship’s knowledge he broke into a strain of remark which was _not_ precisely that of the “Hebrew Melodies.” Doubtless he carries away from such encounter a great reserve of bottled wrath--not so much against her ladyship personally, as against the stolid proprieties, the unbending scruples, the lady-like austerities, and the cool, elegant dowager-dignities she represents. Fancy a man who has put such soul as he has, and such strength and hope and pride as he has, into those swift poems, which have taken his heart’s blood to their making--fancy him, asked by the woman who has set out to widen his hopes and life by all the helps of wifehood, “_When--pray--he means to give up those versifying habits of his?_” No, I do not believe he resented this in language. I don’t believe he argued the point; I don’t believe he made defence of versifying habits; but I imagine that he regarded her with a dazed look, and an eye that saw more than it seemed to see--an eye that discerned broad shallows in her, where he had hoped for pellucid depths. I think he felt then--if never before--a premonition that their roads would not lie long together. And yet it gave him a shock--not altogether a pleasant one, we may be sure--when Sir Ralph, the father-in-law, to whose house she had gone on a visit, wrote him politely to the effect that--“she would never come back.” Such things cannot be pleasant; at least, I should judge not.

And so, she thinks something more of marriage than as some highly reckoned conventionality--under whose cover bickerings may go on and spend their force, and the decent twin masks be always worn. And in him, we can imagine lingering traces of a love for the feminine features in her--for the grace, the dignity, the sweet face, the modesties--but all closed over and buckled up, and stanched by the everlasting and all encompassing buckram that laces her in, and that has so little of the compensating instinctive softness and yieldingness which might hold him in leash and win him back. The woman who cannot--on occasions--put a weakness into her forgiveness, can never put a vital strength into her persuasion.

But they part, and part forever; the only wonder is they had not parted before; and still another wonder is, that there should have been zealous hunt for outside causes when so many are staringly apparent within the walls of home. I do not believe that Byron would have lived at peace with one woman in a thousand; I do not believe that Lady Byron would have lived at peace with one man in a hundred. The computation is largely in her favor; although it does not imply necessity for his condemnation as an utter brute. Even as he sails away from England--from which he is hunted with hue and cry, and to whose shores he is never again to return--he drops a farewell to her with such touches of feeling in it, that one wonders--and future readers always will wonder--with what emotions the mother and his child may have read it:

“Fare thee well and if for ever,[66] Still for ever--fare thee well! Even tho’ unforgiving--never ’Gainst thee shall my heart rebel. … Love may sink by slow decay But, by sudden wrench, believe not Hearts can thus be torn away. And when thou would’st solace gather, When our child’s first accents flow, Wilt thou teach her to say ‘Father’ Though his care she must forego? When her little hands shall press thee, When her lip to thine is prest, Think of him whose prayer shall bless thee; Think of him thy love has blessed. Should her lineaments resemble Those thou never more may’st see, Then thy heart will softly tremble With a pulse yet true to me; All my faults perchance thou knowest, All my madness none can know, All my hopes where’er thou goest Wither--yet, with thee they go. Every feeling hath been shaken; Pride which not a world could bow, Bows to thee--by thee forsaken, Even my soul forsakes me now. But ’tis done, all words are idle; Words from _me_ are vainer still; But the thoughts we cannot bridle Force their way, without the will. Fare thee well! thus disunited, Torn from every nearer tie, Seared in heart and lone, and blighted-- More than this, I scarce can die.”

I should have felt warranted in giving some intelligible account of the poet’s infelicities at home were it only to lead up to this exhibit of his wondrous literary skill; but I find still stronger reasons in the fact that the hue and cry which followed upon his separation from his wife seemed to exalt the man to an insolent bravado, and a challenge of all restraint--under which his genius flamed up with new power, and with a blighting splendor.

_Exile._

It was on the 25th of April, 1816 (he being then in his twenty-eighth year), that he bade England adieu forever, and among the tenderest of his leave-takings was that from his sister, who had vainly sought to make smooth the difficulties in his home, and who (until Lady Byron had fallen into the blindness of dotage) retained her utmost respect. I cannot forbear quoting two verses from a poem addressed to this devoted sister:

“Though the rock of my last hope is shivered And its fragments are sunk in the wave, Though I feel that my soul is delivered To pain--it shall _not_ be its slave; There is many a pang to pursue me; They may crush--but they shall not contemn, They may torture, but shall not subdue me, ’Tis of _thee_ that I think--not of them.

“From the wreck of the past, which hath perished, Thus much I at least may recall, It hath taught me that what I most cherished Deserved to be dearest of all; In the desert a fountain is springing, In the wide waste, there still is a tree, And a bird in the solitude singing Which speaks to my spirit of _thee_.”

Never was a man pelted away from his native shores with more anathemas; never one in whose favor so few appealing voices were heard. It was not so much a memory of his satirical thrusts, as a jealousy begotten by his late extraordinary successes, which had alienated nearly the whole literary fraternity. Only Rogers, Moore, and Scott were among the better known ones who had forgiven his petulant verse, and were openly apologetic and friendly; while such kind wishers as Lady Holland and Lady Jersey were half afraid to make a show of their sympathies. Creditors, too, of that burdened estate of his, had pushed their executions one upon another--in those days when his torments were most galling--into what was yet called with poor significance his home; only his title of peer, Moore tells us, at one date saved him from prison.

Yet when he lands in Belgium, he travels--true to his old recklessness--like a prince; with body servants and physician, and a lumbering family coach, with its showy trappings. Waterloo was fresh then, and the wreck and the blood, and the glory of it were all scored upon his brain, and shortly afterward by his fiery hand upon the poem we know so well, and which will carry that streaming war pennon in the face of other generations than ours. Then came the Rhine, with its castles and traditions, glittering afresh in the fresh stories that he wove; and after these his settlement for a while upon the borders of Lake Geneva--where, in some one of these talks of ours we found the studious Gibbon, under his acacia-trees, and where Rousseau left his footprints--never to be effaced--at Clarens and Meillerie. One would suppose that literature could do no more with such outlooks on lake and mountain, as seem to mock at language.

And yet the wonderful touch of Byron has kindled new interest in scenes on which the glowing periods of Rousseau had been lavished. Even the guide-books can none of them complete their record of the region without stealing descriptive gems from his verse; and his story of the _Prisoner of Chillon_ will always--for you and for me--lurk in the shadows that lie under those white castle walls, and in the murmur of the waters that ebb and flow--gently as the poem--all round about their foundations. I may mention that at the date of the Swiss visit, and under the influences and active co-operation of Madame de Staël--then a middle-aged and invalid lady residing at her country seat of Coppet, on the borders of Geneva Lake--Byron did make overtures for a reconciliation with his wife. They proved utterly without avail, even if they were not treated with scorn. And it is worthy of special note that while up to this date all mention of Lady Byron by the poet had been respectful, if not relenting and conciliatory--thereafter the vials of his wrath were opened, and his despairing scorn knew no bounds. Thus, in the “Incantation”--thrust into that uncanny work of _Manfred_--with which he was then at labor--he says:

“Though thou seest me not pass by, Thou shalt feel me with thine eye, As a thing that, though unseen, Must be near thee, and hath been; And when, in that secret dread, Thou hast turned around thy head, Thou shalt marvel I am not As thy shadow on the spot; And the power which thou dost feel Shall be what thou must conceal.”

_Shelley and Godwin._

Another episode of Byron’s Swiss life was his encounter there, for the first time, with the poet Shelley.[67] He, too, was under ban, for reasons that I must briefly make known. Like his brother poet, Shelley was born to a prospective inheritance of title and of wealth. His father was a baronet, shrewd and calculating, and living by the harshest and baldest of old conventionalisms; this father had given a warm, brooding care to the estate left him by Sir Bysshe Shelley (the grandfather of the poet), who had an American bringing up--if not an American birth--in the town of Newark,[68] N. J. The boy poet had the advantages of a place at Eton[69]--not altogether a favorite there, it would seem; “passionate in his resistance to an injury, passionate in his love.” He carried thence to Oxford a figure and a beauty of countenance that were almost effeminate; and yet he had a capacity for doubts and negations that was wondrously masculine. His scholarship was keen, but not tractable; he takes a wide range outside the established order of studies; he is a great and unstinted admirer of the French philosophers, and makes such audacious free-thinking challenge to the church dignitaries of Oxford that he is expelled--like something venomous. His father, too, gives him the cold shoulder at this crisis, and he drifts to London. There he contrives interviews with his sisters, who are in school at Clapham; and is decoyed into a marriage--before he is twenty--with a somewhat pretty and over-bold daughter of a coffee-house keeper, who has acted as a go-between in communications with his sisters. The prudent, conventional father is now down upon him with a vengeance.

But the boy has pluck under that handsome face of his. He sets out, with his wife--after sundry wanderings--to redeem Ireland; but they who are used to blunderbusses, undervalue Shelley’s fine periods, and his fine face. He is some time in Wales, too (the mountains there fastening on his thought and cropping out in after poems); he is in Edinboro’, in York, in Keswick--making his obeisance to the great Southey (but coming to over-hate of him in after years). Meantime he has children. Sometimes money comes from the yielding father--sometimes none; he is abstemious; bread and water mostly his diet; his home is without order or thrift or invitingness--the lapses of the hoydenish girl-wife stinging him over and over and through and through.

But Shelley has read Godwin’s _Political Justice_--one of those many fine schemes for the world’s renovation, by tearing out and burning up most of the old furniture, which make their appearance periodically--and in virtue of his admiration of Godwin, Shelley counts him among the demi-gods of the heaven which he has conjured up. In reality Godwin[70] was an oldish, rather clumsy, but astute and clever dissenting minister, who had left preaching, and had not only written _Political Justice_, but novels--among them one called _Caleb Williams_; by which you will know him better--if you know him at all. This gave him great reputation in its time. There were critics who ranked him with, or above, Scott--even in fiction. This may tempt you to read _Caleb Williams_;[71] and if you read it--you will not forget it. It pinches the memory like a vice; much reading of it might, I should think, engender, in one of vivid imagination, such nightmare stories as “_Called Back_” or “_A Dark Day_.”

But Mr. Godwin had a daughter, Mary (whose mother was that Mary Wollstonecraft, promoted now to a place amongst famous women), and our Shelley going to see Godwin, saw also the daughter Mary--many times over; and these two--having misty and mystic visions of a new order of ethics--ran away together.

It must be said, however, to the credit of Shelley (if credit be the word to use), that when this first wife killed herself--as she did some eighteen months afterward[72] (whether from grief or other cause is doubtful)--he married Miss Godwin; and it was during the summer preceding this second marriage that Byron (1816) encountered Shelley on the shores of Lake Leman. Shelley had already written that wild screed of _Queen Mab_ (privately printed, 1813), giving poetic emphasis to the scepticism of his Oxford days. He had published that dreamy poem of _Alastor_--himself its poet hero, as indeed he was in a large sense of every considerable poem he wrote. I cite a fragment of it, that you may see what waking and beguiling voice belonged to the young bard, who posed there on the Geneva lake beside the more masculine Byron. He has taken us into forest depths:

“One vast mass Of mingling shade, whose brown magnificence A narrow vale embosoms. The pyramids Of the tall cedar, overarching, frame Most solemn domes within; and far below, Like clouds suspended in an emerald sky, The ash and the acacia floating, hang Tremulous and pale. Like restless serpents clothed In rainbow and in fire, the parasites Starred with ten thousand blossoms flowed around The gray trunks; and as gamesome infants’ eyes, With gentle meanings and most innocent wiles Fold their beams round the hearts of those that love, These twine their tendrils with the wedded boughs. … the woven leaves Make net-work of the dark blue lights of day And the night’s noontide clearness, mutable As shapes in the weird clouds. One darkest glen Sends from its woods of musk-rose twined with jasmine A soul-dissolving odor, to invite To some more lovely mystery. Through the dell Silence and twilight here, twin sisters, keep Their noonday watch, and sail among the shades Like vaporous shapes half seen.”

And such mysteries and vaporous shapes run through all his poetic world. He wanders, with that rarely fine gift of rhythmic speech, as wide away from the compact sordid world--upon which Byron always sets foot with a ringing tread--as ever Spenser in his chase of rainbow creations. Yet there were penetrative sinuous influences about that young poet--defiant of law and wrapt in his pursuit of mysteries--which may well have given foreign touches of color to Byron’s _Manfred_ or to his _Prometheus_. At any rate, these two souls lay quietly for a time, warped together--like two vessels windbound under mountain shelter.

_Byron in Italy._

Byron next goes southward, to riotous life in Venice; where--whether in tradesmen’s houses or in palaces upon the Grand Canal, or in country villas upon the Euganean hills--he defies priests and traditions, and order, and law, and decency.

To this period belongs, probably, the conception, if not the execution, of many of those dramas[73]--as non-playable as ever those of Tennyson--unequal, too, but with passages scattered here and there of great beauty; masterly aggregation of words smoking with passion, and full of such bullet-like force of expression as only he could command; but there is no adequate blending of parts to make either stately or well-harmonized march of events toward large and definite issues.

Out of the Venetian welter came, too, the fourth canto of _Childe Harold_ and the opening parts of _Don Juan_. The mocking, rollicking, marvellous _Vision of Judgment_, whose daring license staggered even Murray and Moore, and which scarified poor Southey, belongs to a later phase of his Italian career. It is angry and bitter--and has an impish laughter in it--of a sort which our friend Robert Ingersoll might write, if his genius ran to poetry. _Cain_ had been of a bolder tone--perhaps loftier; with much of the argument that Milton puts into the mouth of Satan, amplified and rounded, and the whole illuminated by passages of wonderful poetic beauty.

His scepticism, if not so out-spoken and full of plump negatives as that of Shelley, is far more mocking and bitter. If Shelley was rich in negations--so far as relates to orthodox belief--he was also rich in dim, shadowy conceptions of a mysterious eternal region, with faith and love reigning in it--toward which in his highest range of poetic effusion he makes approaches with an awed and a tremulous step. But with Byron--even where his words carry full theistic beliefs--the awe and the tremulous approaches are wanting.

_Shelley Again._

Shelley went back from Switzerland to a home for a year or more, beyond Windsor, near to Bisham--amid some of the loveliest country that borders upon the Thames. Here he wrote that strange poem of _Laon and Cythna_ (or _Revolt of Islam_, as it was called on its re-issue), which, so far as one can gather meaning from its redundant and cumulated billows of rich, poetic language, tells how a nation was kindled to freedom by the strenuous outcry of some young poet-prophet--how he seems to win, and his enemies become like smoking flax--how the dreadful fates that beset us, and crowd all worldly courses from their best outcome, did at last trample him down; not him only, but the one dearest to him--who is a willing victim--and bears him off into the shades of night. Throughout, Laon the Victim is the poet’s very self; and the very self appears again--with what seems to the cautious, world-wise reader a curious indiscretion--in the pretty jumping metre of “Rosalind and Helen”:--

“Joyous he was; and hope and peace On all who heard him did abide, Raining like dew from his sweet talk, As where the evening star may walk Along the brink of the gloomy seas, Liquid mists of splendid quiver. His very gestures touched to tears The unpersuaded tyrant, never So moved before.… Men wondered, and some sneered, to see One sow what he could never reap; For he is rich, they said, and young, And might drink from the depths of luxury. If he seeks Fame, Fame never crowned The champion of a trampled creed; If he seeks Power, Power is enthroned ’Mid ancient rights and wrongs, to feed Which hungry wolves with praise and spoil, Those who would sit near Power must toil.”

It was in 1818, four years before his death, that Shelley sailed away from English shores forever. There was not much to hold him there; those children of the Westbrook mother he cannot know or guide.[74] The Chancellor of England has decided that question against him; and Law, which he has defied, has wrought him this great pain; nay, he has wild, imaginary fears, too, that some Lord Chancellor, weaving toils in that web of orderly British custom, may put bonds on these other and younger children of the Godwin blood. Nor is it strange that a world of more reasonable motives should urge this subtle poet--whose head is carried of purpose, and by love, among the clouds--to turn his back on that grimy, matter-of-fact England, and set his face toward those southern regions where Art makes daily food, and where he may trail his robes without the chafings of law or custom. But do not let me convey the impression that Shelley then or ever lived day by day wantonly lawless, or doing violence to old-fashioned proprieties; drunkenness was always a stranger to him, to that new household--into which he had been grafted by Godwinian ethics--he is normally true; he would, if it were possible, bring into the lap of his charities those other estrays from whom the law divides him; his generosities are of the noblest and fullest; he even entertains at one time the singular caprice of “taking orders,” as if the author of _Queen Mab_ could hold a vicarage! It opens, he said, so many ways of doing kindly things, of making hearts joyful; and--for doctrine, one can always preach Charity! With rare exceptions, it is only in his mental attitudes and forays that he oversteps the metes and bounds of the every-day moralities around him. Few poets, even of that time, can or do so measure him as to enjoy him or to give him joy. Leigh Hunt is gracious and kindly; but there are no winged sandals on his feet which can carry him into regions where Shelley walks. Southey is stark unbeliever in the mystic fields where Shelley grazes. Wordsworth is conquered by the Art, but has melancholy doubts of the soul that seems caught and hindered in the meshes of its own craftsmanship. Landor, of a certainty, has detected with his keen insight the high faculties that run rampant under the mazes of the new poet’s language; but Landor, too, is in exile--driven hither and thither by the same lack of steady home affinities which has overset and embroiled the domesticities of the younger poet.

_John Keats._

Yet another singer of these days, in most earnest sympathy with the singing moods of Shelley--for whom I can have only a word now, was John Keats;[75] born within the limits of London smoke, and less than three-quarters of a mile from London Bridge--knowing in his boy days only the humblest, work-a-day ranges of life; getting some good Latinity and other schooling out of a Mr. Clarke (of the Cowden Clarke family)--reading Virgil with him, but no Greek. And yet the lad, who never read Homer save in Chapman, when he comes to write, as he does in extreme youth, crowds his wonderful lines with the delicate trills and warblings which might have broken out straight from Helicon--with a susurrus from the Bees of Hymettus. This makes a good argument--so far as it reaches--in disproof of the averments of those who believe that, for conquest of Attic felicities of expression, the Greek vocables must needs be torn forth root by root, and stretched to dry upon our skulls.

He published _Endymion_ in the very year when Shelley set off on his final voyagings--a gushing, wavy, wandering poem, intermeshed with flowers and greenery (which he lavishes), and with fairy golden things in it and careering butterflies; with some bony under-structure of Greek fable--loose and vague--and serving only as the caulking pins to hold together the rich, sensuous sway, and the temper and roll of his language.

I must snatch one little bit from that book of _Endymion_, were it only to show you what music was breaking out in unexpected quarters from that fact-ridden England, within sound of the murmurs of the Thames, when Shelley was sailing away:--

“On every morrow are we wreathing A flowery band to bind us to the earth Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth Of noble natures, of the gloomy days, Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways Made for our searching; yes, in spite of all, Some shape of beauty moves away the pall From our dark spirits. Such--the sun, the moon, Trees--old and young, sprouting a shady boon For simple sheep; and such are daffodils With the green world they live in; and clear rills That for themselves a cooling covert make ’Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms; And such, too, is the grandeur of the dooms We have imagined for the mighty dead; All lovely tales that we have heard or read.”

I might cite page on page from Keats, and yet hold your attention; there is something so beguiling in his witching words; and his pictures are finished--with only one or two or three dashes of his pencil. Thus we come upon--

“Swelling downs, where sweet air stirs Blue harebells lightly, and where prickly furze Buds lavish gold.”

And again our ear is caught with--

“Rustle of the reapéd corn, And sweet birds antheming the morn.”

Well, this young master of song goes to Italy, too--not driven, like Byron, by hue and cry, or like Shelley, restless for change (from Chancellor’s courts) and for wider horizons--but running from the disease which has firm grip upon him, and which some three years after Shelley’s going kills the poet of the _Endymion_ at Rome. His ashes lie in the Protestant burial-ground there--under the shadow of the pyramid of Caius Cestius. Every literary traveller goes to see the grave, and to spell out the words he wanted inscribed there:

“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

Upon that death, Shelley, then living in Pisa, blazed out in the _Adonais_--the poem making, with the _Lycidas_ of Milton, and the _In Memoriam_ of Tennyson, a triplet of laurel garlands, whose leaves will never fade. Yet those of Shelley have a cold rustle in them--shine as they may:--

“Oh, weep for Adonais--he is dead! Wake, melancholy mother, wake and weep! Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed Thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep Like his--a mute and uncomplaining sleep. For he is gone where all things wise and fair Descend. Oh, dream not that the amorous deep Will yet restore him to the vital air; Death feeds on his mute voice and laughs at our despair.

“Oh, weep for Adonais! The quick dreams, The passion-winged ministers of thought Who were his flocks, whom near the living streams Of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught The Love which was its music, wander not-- Wander no more from kindling brain to brain, But droop there whence they sprung; and mourn their lot Round the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain, They ne’er will gather strength, or find a home again.”

The weak place in this impassioned commemorative poem lies in its waste of fire upon the heads of those British critics, who--as flimsy, pathetic legends used to run--slew the poet by their savagery. Keats did not range among giants; but he was far too strong a man to die of the gibes of the _Quarterly_, or the jeers of _Blackwood_. Not this; but all along, throughout his weary life--even amid the high airs of Hampstead, where nightingales sang--he sang, too,--

“I have been half in love with easeful Death, Called him soft names in many a muséd rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath.”[76]

_Buried in Rome._

Keats died in 1821. In that year Shelley was living between Lirici, on the gulf of Spezia, and Pisa. While in this latter city, he was planted for a time at the old Lanfranchi palace, where in the following season very much at the instance and urgence of Shelley, Leigh Hunt came with his six riotous young children, and sometimes made a din--that was new to Byron and most worrisome--in the court of the Lanfranchi house. Out of this Hunt fraternizing and co-working (forecast by the kindly Shelley) was to be built up the success of that famous “Liberal” Journal, dear to the hearts of Shelley and Hunt, of which I have already spoken, and which had disastrous failure; out of this aggregation of disorderly poetic elements grew also the squabbles that gave such harsh color to the _Reminiscences_ of Leigh Hunt.[77]

But other and graver disaster was impending. Shelley loved the sea, and carried with him to the water the same reckless daring which he put into his verse. Upon a summer day of July, 1822, he went with a friend and one boatman for a sail upon the bay of Spezia, not heeding some cautions 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.” Intellectually, 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 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 neighborhood, 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 and their finish on that wild Continental holiday--beginning on _Lac Leman_ and ending at Pisa and Genoa; but his real selfhood--whether of 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 beginning 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; a revised Byron would be not only a Byron emasculated, but decapitated and devastated. ’Twould lack the links that tie it to the humanities which coil and writhe tortuously all up and down his pages. His faults of prosody, or of ethics, or of facts--his welter, at intervals, through a barren splendor of words--are all typical of that fierce, proud, ungovernable, unconventional nature. This leopard will and should carry all his spots. We cannot shrive the man; no chanters or churches can do this; he disdains to be shriven at human hands, or, it would seem, any other hands. The impact of that strong, vigorous nature--through his poems--brings, to the average reader, a sense of force, of brilliancy, of personality, of humanity (if gone astray), which exhilarates, which dashes away a thousand wordy memories of wordy verses, and puts in their place palpitating phrases that throb with life. An infinite capability for eloquent verse; an infinite capability for badnesses! We cannot root out the satanry from the man, or his books, any more than we can root out Lucifer from Milton’s Eden. But we can lament both, and, if need be, fight them.

Whether closer British influence (which usually smote upon him, like sleet on glass)--even of that “Ancient Oratory” of Annesley--would have served to whiten his tracks, who shall say? Long ago he had gone out from them, and from parish church and sermon; his hymns were the _Ranz des Vaches_ on the heights of the _Dent de Jaman_, and the preachments he heard were the mellowed tones of convent bells--filtering through forest boughs--maybe upon the ear of some hapless Allegra, scathed by birth-marks of a sin that is not her own--conning her beads, and listening and praying!

_Missolonghi._

It was in 1823, when he was living in Genoa--whither he had gone from Pisa (and before this, Ravenna)--that his sympathies were awakened in behalf of the Greeks, who since 1820 had been in revolt against their Turkish taskmasters. He had been already enrolled with those Carbonari--the forerunners of the Mazzinis and the Garibaldis--who had labored in vain for the independence and unity of Italy; and in many a burst of his impassioned song he had showered welcoming praises upon a Greece that should be free, and with equal passion attuned his verse to the lament--that

“Freedom found no champion and no child Such as Columbia saw arise when she Sprung forth a Pallas, armed and undefiled.”

How much all this was real and how much only the romanticism of the poet, was now to be proven. And it was certainly with a business-like air that he cut short his little _agaceries_ with the Lady Blessington, and pleasant dalliance with the Guiccioli, for a rallying of all his forces--moneyed or other--in the service of that cause for which the brave Marco Bozzaris had fallen, fighting, only three months before. It was in July that he embarked at Genoa for Greece--in a brig which he had chartered, and which took guns and ammunition and $40,000 of his own procurement, with a retinue of attendants--including his trusty Fletcher--besides his friends Trelawney and the Count Gamba. They skirted the west coast of Italy, catching sight of Elba--then famous for its Napoleonic associations--and of Stromboli, whose lurid blaze, reflected upon the sea, startled the admiring poet to a hinted promise--that those fires should upon some near day reek on the pages of a Fifth Canto of _Childe Harold_.

Mediterranean ships were slow sailers in those days, and it was not until August that they arrived and disembarked at Cephalonia--an island near to the outlet of the Gulf of Corinth, and lying due east from the Straits of Messina. There was a boisterous welcome to the generous and eloquent peer of England; but it was a welcome that showed factional discords. Only across a mile or two of water lay the Isle of Ithaca, full of vague, Homeric traditions, which under other conditions he would have been delighted to follow up; but the torturing perplexities about the distribution of moneys or ammunition, the jealousies of quarrelsome chieftains, the ugly watch over drafts and bills of exchange, and the griping exactions of local money-changers, made all Homeric fancies or memories drift away with the scuds of wind that blew athwart the Ionian seas.

He battled bravely with the cumulating difficulties--sometimes maddened to regret--other times lifted to enthusiasm by the cordial greeting of such a chieftain as Mavrocordatos, or the street cheers of a band of Suliotes. So months passed, until he embarked again, in equipage of his own, with his own fittings, for Missolonghi, where final measures were to be taken. Meantime he is paying for his ships, paying for his Suliotes, paying for delays, and beset by rival chieftains for his interest, or his stimulating presence, or his more stimulating moneys. On this new but short sea venture he barely escapes capture by a Turkish frigate--is badly piloted among the rocky islets which stud the shores; suffers grievous exposure--coming at last, wearied and weakened, to a new harborage, where welcomes are vociferous, but still wofully discordant. He labors wearily to smooth the troubled waters, his old, splendid allegiance to a free and united Greece suffering grievous quakes, and doubts; and when after months of alternating turbulence and rest there seems promise of positive action, he is smitten by the fever of those low coasts--aggravated by his always wanton exposures. The attack is as sudden as a shot from a gun--under which he staggers and falls, writhing with pain, and I know not what convulsional agonies.

There is undertaken an Italian regimen of cupping and leeching about the brow and temples, from which the bleeding is obstinate, and again and again renewed. But he rallies; attendants are assiduous in their care. Within a day or two he has recovered much of the old _vires vitæ_, when on a sudden there is an alarm; a band of mutinous Suliotes, arms in hand, break into his lordship’s apartments, madly urging some trumpery claim for back-pay. Whereupon Byron--showing the old savagery of his ancestors--leaps from his bed, seizes whatever weapon is at hand, and gory--with his bandaged head still trickling blood--he confronts the mutineers; his strength for the moment is all his own again, and they are cowered into submission, their yataghans clinking as they drop to the tiled flooring of his room.

’Twas a scene for Benjamin West to have painted in the spirit of Death on the Pale Horse, or for some later artist--loving bloody “impressions.” However, peace is established. Quiet reigns once more (we count by days only, now). There is a goodly scheme for attack upon the fortress which guards the Gulf of Lepanto (Corinth); the time is set; the guards are ready; the Suliotes are under bidding; the chieftains are (for once) agreed, when, on the 18th, he falters, sinks, murmurs some last words--“Ada--daughter--love--Augusta--” barely caught; doubtfully caught; but it is all--and the poet of _Childe Harold_ is gone, and that turbulent, brilliant career hushed in night.

It was on April 19, 1824, that he died. His body was taken home for burial. I said _home_; ’twere better to have said to England, to the family vault, in which his mother had been laid; and at a later day, his daughter, Ada, was buried there beside him, in the old Hucknall-Torkard church. The building is heavy and bald, without the winning picturesqueness that belongs to so many old country churches of Yorkshire. The beatitudes that are intoned under its timbered arch are not born of any rural beatitudes in the surroundings. The town is small, straggly, bricky,[78] and neither church nor hamlet nor neighbors’ houses are suffused with those softened tints which verdure, and nice keeping, and mellow sunshine give to so many villages of southern England. Hucknall-Torkard is half way between Nottingham and Newstead, and lies upon that northern road which pushes past Annesley into the region of woods and parks where Sherwood forest once flung its shadows along the aisles in which the bugle notes of master Robin Hood woke the echoes.

But Hucknall-Torkard church is bald and tame. Mr. Winter, in his pleasant descriptive sketch,[79] does indeed give a certain glow to the “grim” tower, and many a delightful touch to the gray surroundings; but even he would inhibit the pressure of the noisy market-folk against the church-yard walls, and their rollicking guffaw. And yet, somehow, the memory of Byron does not seem to me to mate well with either home or church quietudes, and their serenities. Is it not proper and fitting after all that the clangor of a rebellious and fitful world should voice itself near such a grave? Old mossy and ivied towers in which church bells are a-chime, and near trees where rooks are cawing with home-sounds, do not marry happily with our memories of Byron.

Best of all if he had been given burial where his heart lies, in that Ætolian country, upon some shaggy fore-land from which could have been seen--one way, Ithaca and the Ionian seas, and to the southward, across the Straits of Lepanto, the woody depths of the Morea, far as Arcadia.

But there is no mending the matter now; he lies beside his harsh Gordon mother in the middle of the flat country of stockings, lace curtains, and collieries.

Another poet, William Lisle Bowles, in a quaint sonnet has versed this Gordon mother’s imaginary welcome to her dead son:--

“Could that mother speak, In thrilling, but with hollow accent weak, She thus might give the welcome of the dead: ‘Here rest, my son, with me; the dream is fled; The motley mask, and the great stir is o’er. Welcome to me, and to this silent bed, Where deep forgetfulness succeeds the roar Of life, and fretting passions waste the heart no more!’”