Part 44

To this wild region they had come to indulge Shelley's passion for boating. News came of Leigh Hunt having arrived at Pisa. Shelley, and his friend Captain Ellerker Williams, set out to welcome him, and were on their return to Lerici when the fatal squall came on, and they went down in a moment. The particulars of that event, and the singular scene of the burning of the body by his friends, Byron, Hunt, Trelawney, and Captain Shenley, have been so vividly related by Mr. Hunt as to be familiar to every one. Shelley had gone down with the last volume of Keats, the Lamia, &c., in his jacket pocket, where it was found open. The bodies came on shore near Via Reggio, but had been so long in the sea as to be much decomposed. Wood was therefore collected on the strand, and they were burned in the old classical style. The magnificent Bay of Spezia, says Mr. Hunt, is on the right of this spot, Leghorn on the left, at equal distances of about twenty-two miles. The headlands projecting boldly and far into the sea, form a deep and dangerous gulf, with a heavy swell and a strong current generally running right into it.

So ended this extraordinary man his short, but eventful and influential life; and his ashes were buried near his friend John Keats, under a beautiful ruined tower in the English burial-ground at Rome. It was remarkable, that Shelley always said that no presentiment of evil ever came to him except as an unusual elevation of spirits. When he was last seen, just before his embarking for his return, he was said to be in most brilliant spirits. On the contrary, Mrs. Shelley says, "If ever shadow of evil darkened the present hour, such was over my mind when they went. During the whole of our stay at Lerici an intense presentiment of coming evil brooded over my mind, and covered this beautiful place and genial summer with the shadow of coming misery. * * A vague expectation of evil shook me to agony, and I could scarcely bring myself to let them go." The very beauty of the place, she says, seemed unearthly in its excess; the distance they were from all signs of civilization, the sea at their feet, its murmurings or its roarings forever in their ears, led the mind to brood over strange thoughts, and, lifting it from every-day life, caused it to be familiar with the unreal. "Shelley," she adds, "had now, as it seemed, almost anticipated his own destiny; and when the mind figures his skiff wrapped from sight by the thunder-storm, as it was last seen upon the purple sea, and then as the cloud of the tempest passed away, no sign remained of where it had been--who but will regard as a prophecy the last stanza of the Adonais?

'The breath, whose might I have invoked in song, Descend upon me: my spirit's bark is driven Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng, Whose sails were never to the tempest given; The massy earth and sphered skies are riven! I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar; While burning through the inmost veil of heaven, The soul of Adonais, like a star, Beacons from the abode where the eternal are.'"

LORD BYRON.

In The Rural Life of England, I have already recorded my visits to two of the most interesting haunts of Lord Byron--Newstead Abbey and Annesley Hall. In this paper we will take a more chronological and consecutive survey of his haunts and abodes.

Lord Byron was, it appears, born in London, in lodgings in Holles-street, as his mother was on her way from France to Scotland. His mother, whose history and ill-starred marriage are well known through Moore's life of the poet, had accompanied her husband to France soon after their marriage, to avoid the swarm of claimants on her property, the creditors of her dissipated husband, which that marriage had brought upon her. The Byrons, who had inherited the estate of Newstead, in Nottinghamshire, since the reign of Henry VIII., when it was granted to Sir John Byron, generally called The Little Sir John Byron, had distinguished themselves greatly in the civil wars, but had of late years been much more conspicuous for their poverty and eccentricity. Commodore Byron, whose name will always be remembered from the narrative of the sufferings of himself and crew, in consequence of the wreck of the Wager, and who was still better known by the name of "Foul-weather Jack," from the singular fact that he never put to sea, even when holding the rank of admiral, and in command of the fleet for the protection of the West Indies, without encountering the most tempestuous weather, was his grandfather. His father, Captain Byron, appears to have been one of the most unprincipled and dissipated men of his day. He ran off with the wife of Lord Carmarthen to the Continent; and this, of course, leading to a divorce, he married Lady Carmarthen, and had by her one daughter, the present Hon. Augusta Leigh, the wife of Colonel Leigh. Lady Carmarthen did not live long; and covered with debt, and pursued by hungry creditors, Captain Byron looked out for some woman of fortune to victimize to his own comfort. This species of legalized robbery, that is, of selecting a simple and unsuspecting woman to plunder under the sanction of the laws, instead of running the hazard of hanging or transportation by the more vulgar method of highway robbery, house-breaking, or forgery, is one so fashionable, that a man like Captain Byron was not likely to boggle at it. Of all species of theft, it is the most dastardly and despicable, because it is performed under the sacred name of affection. The vampire who means to suck the blood of the selected victim, makes his approach with flatteries and vows of the deepest attachment, of the most eternal tenderness, and protection from the ills of life. He wins the heart of the confiding woman by the basest lies, and then deliberately proceeds to the altar to pronounce before the all-seeing God the same falsehood, "to love and comfort," and "cherish till death," the helpless creature that is binding herself for life to ruin and deception. One would think it were enough for a man to feel, as he stands thus before God and man, that he is a mere seeker of creature comforts and worldly honor while he is wedding a rich wife; but knowingly to have picked out his prey under the pretense of loving her above all of her sex, in order to hand over her estate to his creditors, to defray the scores of his gambling and licentiousness, that characterizes a monster of so revolting a kind, that nothing but the gradual corruption of society through the medium of conventionalism could save him from the expatriating execrations of his fellows. There are cases of peculiar aggravation of this kind, those where the property of the victim is almost wholly demanded for the liquidation of the demon-lover's debts, and the wife is left to instantaneous beggary. The marriage of Captain Byron was one very much of this kind. His wife's most convertible property, as bank shares, salmon fisheries, money securities, were hastily disposed of; then went the timber from her estates, then the estates themselves, all amounting to probably £30,000, leaving her a mere annuity of £123! The property gone to this mite, the harpy husband still hung upon her, and upbraided her with the want of further means to contribute to his reckless riot. With cash extorted from her now severe poverty, he at length luckily departed again for the Continent, and died at Valenciennes in 1791, when Byron was three years old.

Such were the circumstances in which Lord Byron entered the world. If he were the prey of violent passions; if he, too, had a tendency to dissipation; if he, in future years, followed his father's example, though not to so culpable a degree, and married an heiress,

"And spoiled her goodly lands to gild his waste,"

there may be some excuse for him, drawn from hereditary taint. His father was not the solitary instance of irregularity, violent passions, and wastefulness. His great-uncle, to whose title and diminished property he succeeded, was of the like stamp. His violence had led to his wife's separation from him; he had killed his next neighbor, Mr. Chaworth, in a duel; he had shot his coachman; he had hewed down extensive plantations on his estate, with the avowed purpose of preventing his son's enjoyment of their profit, because he had offended him. This son, and also his grandson, died before him, and the wifeless and childless old lord had led a moody and solitary life in the decaying abbey of Newstead, which threatened to drop about his ears, feeding a heap of crickets on the hearth, and feared by the whole peasant population of the country round.

Such was the paternal lineage of Lord Byron; his maternal one, if more moral, was not the less fiery and volcanic. His mother, a little fat woman, was a woman of a most excitable temperament, an evil which no doubt was much aggravated by the outrage on her warm affections and trust in her husband, which the base object of his marriage with her revealed in all its blackness to her. She appeared all feeling and passion, with very little judgment to control them. She was fond to distraction of her child, and used to spoil him to the utmost extreme, at the same time that her passions occasionally broke out so impetuously against his freaks, that she would fling the tongs or poker at his head when a mere child.

At the age of eleven brought to England, and, with all this ancestral fire in him, introduced to the ruinous and gloomy abode of his forefathers, with the stories of their recent doings rife all around him, no wonder that on his peculiarly sensitive mind the impression became deep. He grew up a Byron in the eccentricity and other characteristics of his life; like his father, his morals were not very nice, his habits were not very temperate, he too married to repair the waste of his lands, and quitted his wife to live abroad, and die there a comparatively early death. Happily, there was implanted in him an ethereal principle, which gave a higher object to the exercise of his passions and energies than had of late distinguished his fathers. He was a born poet, and the divine gift of poetry converted, in some degree, his hereditary impetuosity into an ennobling instrument. His very dissipations extended his knowledge of life and human nature, and if they led him too frequently to seek to embellish sensuality, they compelled him to depict in the strongest terms that language can furnish, the disgust and remorse which inevitably pursue vice. He was a strange mixture of the poet and the man of the world; of the radical and the aristocrat; of the scoffer at creeds, and the worshiper of the Divine Being in the sublimity of his works. Well was it for him and the world that his early years were cast amid the beauty and the solitude of nature, where he could wander wholly abandoned to the influences of heath and mountain, river and forest; and that the prospect of aristocratic splendor did not come in to disturb those influences till they had acquired a life-long power over him. The grandeur of nature can not make a poet; thousands and millions live during their whole existences amid its most glorious displays, and are little more sentient than the rocks that tower around them; but where the spark of poetry lies latent, it is sure to call it forth.

They who ever visit, then, the earliest scenes of Lord Byron's life, will not be surprised at the influence which they exercised upon him, nor at the fondness with which he cherished the memory of them. This is strongly expressed in one of his juvenile poems.

LACHIN-Y-GAIR.

"Away, ye gay landscapes, ye gardens of roses! In you let the minions of luxury rove; Restore me the rocks, where the snow-flake reposes, Though still they are sacred to freedom and love: Yet, Caledonia, beloved are thy mountains, Round their white summits though elements war; Though cataracts foam 'stead of smooth-flowing fountains, I sigh for the valley of dark Loch na Garr.

"Ah! there my young footsteps in infancy wandered; My cap was the bonnet, my cloak was the plaid; On chieftains long perished my memory pondered, As daily I strode through the pine-covered glade: I sought not my home till the day's dying glory Gave place to the rays of the bright polar star; For fancy was cheered by traditional story, Disclosed by the natives of dark Loch na Garr."

_Hours of Idleness_, p. 111.

The feeling thus ardent in youth was equally vivid to the last. Only about two years before his death he wrote thus in The Island:

"He who first met the Highlands' swelling blue Will love each peak that shows a kindred hue; Hail in each crag a friend's familiar face, And clasp the mountain in his mind's embrace. Long have I roved through lands which are not mine, Adored the Alp, and loved the Apennine; Revered Parnassus, and beheld the steep Jove's Ida, and Olympus crown the deep; But 'twas not all long ages' love, nor all _Their_ nature held me in their thrilling thrall; The infant rapture still survived the boy, And Loch na Garr with Ida looked o'er Troy; Mixed Celtic memories with the Phrygian mount, And Highland linns with Castalie's clear fount."

The city of Aberdeen was the place where the chief part of the earlier boyhood of Byron was spent. He went thither as an unconscious infant, and there, in the neighboring Highlands, he continued till in his eleventh year, when the title fell to him, and he was brought by his mother to England. Aberdeen is a city which must have been a very charming abode for a boy of Byron's disposition, ready either to mix in the throng of lads of his own age in all their plays, contentions, and enterprises, to shoot a marble, or box out a quarrel, or to stroll away into the country and enjoy nature and liberty with an equal zest. There are people who are inclined to think that a great deal of the sublime tone of some of Byron's poetry, as that of the Childe Harold, of the sentiment, almost sentimentality of his Hours of Idleness, and many of his smaller poems throughout his works, was put on by him at will and for effect. They do not see how these things could proceed from the same mind as the rodomontade of many of his most familiar letters, or the slang and wild humor of many parts of Don Juan. How little do such persons know of the human mind! Did not Tam O'Shanter, and Mary in Heaven, and the Cotter's Saturday Night, all proceed from the same mind, and one of the most earnest minds that ever lived? Did not the sublime scenes of the Iliad, and the battle of the beggars in the Odyssey, and the trick of Ulysses in the cave of Polypheme, when he called himself Noman--so that when Polypheme roared out as they put out his eye, and he told his neighbors who came running to inquire what was the matter, that Noman hurt him, they replied,

"If no man hurt thee, why dost thou complain?"

and marched away without helping him--did not these proceed from the same mind? Did not the puns of Hood, and the sober ballad of Eugene Aram, and the Song of the Shirt, proceed from one and the same mind? Did not John Gilpin and the loftiest strains of pious poetry proceed from that of Cowper? Did not Chatterton write equally Sly Dick and the tragedy of Ella? In fact, we might run through the whole circuit of poetic and prose literature, and show that the moods of our minds are as various and changeable as those of external nature. The very gravest, the most steadfast of us, have our transitions from sad to gay, from frivolous to the highest tone of the highest purpose, with a rapidity that seems to belong to the most changeful of us. There is, in fact, no such chameleon, no such kaleidoscope as the human mind. Light and shadow pass over us, and communicate their lusters or their glooms. Facts give us a turn up or down, and the images of our brain present new and ever new arrangements. But in all this change there is no mere chance, far less confusion; every movement depends on a fixed principle. Perhaps there have been few men in whom circumstances--circumstances of physical organization, of life, and education--cherished and made habitual so many varied moods as in Lord Byron. Thrown at a very early age into the bosom of a beautiful and solitary nature, he imbibed a profound and sincere love of nature and solitude. Sent early to public schools to battle his way among boys of his own age, and with a personal defect which often subjected him to raillery, his native spirit made him bristle up and show fight, as he did afterward with his reviewers. Raised to rank and wealth, and, spite of his crooked foot, endowed with, in all other respects, a very fine person, he was led to plunge into the dissipations of young men of his class, and he thus acquired a tone of libertinism that ever afterward, under the same circumstances, was sure to show itself. Led by his quick sense of right and wrong, and by his shrewd insight into character, to despise priestcraft and political despotism, and spurred on by the spirit of the time, especially abroad where he traveled, he imbibed a spirit of skepticism and radicalism as principles. From these causes, he soon began to exhibit the most opposite phases of character. In solitude and nature he was religious in his tone--in society, a scoffer; in solitude he was pensive, and even sentimental--in society he was convivial, fond of practical jokes, satirical. He wrote like a radical, and spoke like an aristocrat. In him Childe Harold and Don Juan, the sublime and the ludicrous, the noble and the mean, the sarcastic and the tender, the voluptuous and beautifully spiritual, the pious and the impious, were all embodied. He was all these by turns, and in all, for the moment, most sincere. Like an instrument of many strings, each had its peculiar tone, and answered faithfully to the external impulse. Multifarious as were his moods, you might in any given circumstances have predicated which of these would prevail. There would be no sensuality in the face of the Alps, there would be no sublimity in the city saloon. If he had to speak in the House of Lords, his speech, by the spirit of antagonism, would assuredly be radical; did he come into contact with the actual mob, he would case himself in the hauteur of the aristocrat. With nature, he was ashamed of men, and his doings and sayings among them; with men, he was ashamed of nature and poetry. He would laugh at his own flights of sentiment. He was a many-sided monster, showing now sublime and now grotesque, but with a feeling in the depths of his soul that he ought to be something greater than he was or dared to be.

To go back, however, from his character to himself. Aberdeen presented to the boy ample food for two of his propensities, those toward the enjoyment of nature and society. The country round, though not sublime, is beautiful. The sea is at hand, an ever grand and stirring object. The Dee comes winding from the mountains of the west through a vale of great loveliness; the Don, from the north, through scenes perhaps still more striking. There is an air of antiquity about the town, with its old churches, colleges, and towers, that is peculiarly pleasing, and the country has likewise a primitive look that wins at once on the spectator. To one of us from the south, the approach to it by the sea is very striking. I do not mean the immediate approach, for this is flat, but the coast voyage out from Edinburgh. The whole coast is bleak, yet green, and presenting to the sea bold and time-worn rocks. For a considerable part of the way they appear to be of red sandstone, and are therefore scooped out into the boldest caves, hollows, and promontories imaginable. Here and there are deep, dark caverns, into which the sea rushes as into its own peculiar dens, and in other places it has cut out arches and doorways through these rocks where they stand insulated, and you see the light through them displaying other rocks behind. One of these is noted for presenting, by effect of light behind it, the appearance of a lady all in white, standing at the mouth of a cave, and beckoning with her hand. As you skim along the coasts of Fife, Forfar, Kincardine, and Aberdeen, these rocks and caverns present ever-new forms, while all the country above them is green, smiling, and cultured now, but formerly must have been savage indeed, and giving rise, and no wonder, to strange superstitions and legends. Bleak little towns ever and anon stretch along the shore; though green, the country is very bare of trees. Dundee, Arbroath, Montrose, are good large towns; and there are the ruins of Arbroath Abbey and Dunnottar Castle, with others of less note. Dunnottar can not be passed without thinking of Old Mortality, whom Scott found in the church-yard there restoring the inscriptions on the grave-stones of the Covenanters; nor can Uri, an old-fashioned house on the bare uplands above Stonehaven, as the abode of Barclay, the writer of the celebrated Apology for Quakerism, and in our day for that of his pedestrian descendant, Captain Barclay. How singular are the reflections which arise on human life and its combinations when gazing on such a place as this! What should induce a man at one time to go forth from a remote scene and solitary old house like this, to mingle with the ferment of the times--to become an active apostle of Quakerism, and the expositor of its faith; and another, nearly two centuries afterward, to march out of the same house down into England, not for an exhibition of Quakerism, but of pedestrianism; not of _reasoning_, but of _walking_ powers? Why should that house--just that house and its family, be destined to produce great Quakers, ending in great walkers and great brewers? How often in my boyhood had I read Barclay's Preface to his Apology, dated from "Uri in Scotland, the Place of my Pilgrimage," and addressed to King Charles II., by "Robert Barclay, the servant of Jesus Christ, called by God to a dispensation of the Gospel revealed anew in this our age," &c. And there it stood, high, bare, and solitary, eliciting the oddest compound ideas of "hops and heresy," according to the phrase of a clergyman of the time, or, rather, of Quakerism, London porter, and walking-matches against time!

Beyond this the coast becomes more and more what is called iron-bound, and the rocks--probably of trap or whinstone--as you advance northward, stand up in the sea, black and curdled as it were, and worn into caverns and perpendicular indentures exactly as you see them in Bewick's wood-cuts. Stepping then on land at Aberdeen, how agreeable is the change! The city, built all of a gray and lustrous granite, has a look of cleanness and neatness almost inconceivable. Since the days of Byron's boyhood great must have been the changes. The main streets are all evidently new; and on advancing into the great street which traverses almost the whole length of the city, Union-street, a mile in length and seventy feet wide, you are struck with a pleasant surprise. The width and extent, the handsome yet plain buildings of clean granite, and the fine public buildings visible in different directions, are far more than you expected in a town so far north.[32] On the river you find an imposing assemblage of ships; you find the Marischal College now built in a very graceful style; and a market-house, I suppose in extent, convenience of arrangement, and supply, inferior to none in the kingdom. The olden streets, such as were in existence in Byron's time, are much more like what you would have looked for, of a narrower and more ordinary character.