9. Towered cities please us then, Where throngs of knights and barons bold In saffron robes, with taper clear, If Jonson's' learned sock be on, Or sweetest Shakspeare, Fancy's child, 10. And ever against eating cares 2 Lap me in soft Lydian airs, Married to immortal verse, Such as the melting soul may pierce, The hidden soul of Harmony; 3 That Orpheus' self may heave his head 1 Ben Jonson, an English dramatist, born in Westminster in 1573, died Aug. 6, 1637. 2 2 Lýd ́i an, pertaining to Lydia, a country of Asia Minor, or to its inhabitants: hence, soft; effeminate; said especially of one of the ancient Greek modes or keys, the music in which was soft and pathetic. Or' phe ŭs, a mythical personage, was regarded by the Greeks as the most celebrated of the early poets who lived before the time of Homer. Presented with the lyre of Apollo, and instructed by the Muses in its use, he enchanted with its music not only the wild beasts, but the trees and rocks upon Olympus, so that they moved from their places to follow the sound of his golden harp. He was the reputed author of the Orphic doctrines. From golden slumber on a bed Of heaped Elysian' flowers, and hear Such strains as would have won the ear Of Pluto, to have quite set free Mirth, with thec I mean to live. MILTON. JOHN MILTON, one of the greatest of all poets and scholars, was born in London, December 9, 1608. He was educated with great care, studied ancient and modern languages, delighted in poetical reading, and cultivated the musical taste which he inherited from his father. At fifteen he was sent to St. Paul's School, London, and two years later to Christ's College, Cambridge, where he graduated in due course. He wrote several poems at an early age. His "Hymn on the Nativity," composed in his twentyfirst year, is one of the noblest of his works, and perhaps the finest lyric in the English language. Leaving the university in 1632, he went to the house of his father, at Hutton in Buckinghamshire, where he lived five years, studying classical literature and writing poems. During this happy period of his life he wrote "L'Allegro," "Il Penseroso," "Arcades," "Lycidas," and "Comus." In 1338 the poet visited the Continent, where he remained fifteen months, principally in Italy and France. His study of the works of art during this period probably suggested some of his best poetical creations. On his return to England in 1639 he took up his residence in London. The next twenty years, during the Civil War, the Commonwealth, and the Protectorate, the poet's lyre was mute. A Republican in politics and an Independent in religion, during this stormy period he threw himself promptly and fearlessly into the vortex of the struggle, and, as a controversialist, enrolled his name among the noblest and most eloquent of the writers of old English prose. In 1643 Milton married Mary Powell, the daughter of a high cavalier of Oxfordshire. In 1649 he was appointed Foreign or Latin Secretary to the Council of State, and retained the same position during the Protectorate. For ten years his eycsight had been failing, when, in 1652, he became totally blind. About the same period his first wife died, but he married soon after. His second wife, Catharine Woodcock, died in 1653. The Restoration of 1660 consigned the poet, for the last fourteen years of his life, to an obscurity which gave him leisure to complete the mighty poetical task which was to secure him an immortality of literary fame. In 1664 he married his third wife, Elizabeth Minshul, of a good Cheshire family. In 1665 he completed "Paradise Lost," which was first published in 1667. In 1671 appeared the "Paradise Regained," to which was subjoined "Samson Agonistes." He died November 8, 1674. 1 E lys' ĭ an, pertaining to Elysium, or the abode of the blessed after death; yielding the highest pleasure; most delightful. was bitten to death. Her husband followed her to Pluto's regions and, by the charm of his lyre, obtained permission for her to return; but 2 Pluto, in mythology, the god of lost her again, having broken the the infernal regions. 3 Eu ryd' i ce, the wife of Orpheus, having trod upon a snake, condition of not looking back after her. Plato says that only a phantasm of the wife was shown. LO SECTION XV. I. 65. CHARACTER OF LORD BYRON. ORD BYRON'S life was not a literary or a cloistered life. He had lived generally in the world, and always and entirely for the world. If he sought seclusion, it was not for the retired leisure or the sweet and innocent tranquillity of a country life. His retreats were rather like that of Tiberius' at Că'preæ— the gloomy solitude of misanthropy and remorse, hiding its despair in darkness, or seeking to stupefy and drown it in vice and debauchery. But, even when he fled from the sight of men, it was only that he might be sought after the mōre; and in the depth of his hiding-places, as was long ago remarked of Timon2 of Ath'ens, he could not live without vomiting fōrth the gall of his bitterness, and sending forth most elaborate curses in good verse to be admired of the very wretches whom he affected to despise. 2. He had much to mortify him. His destiny was a cruel tantalism. He possessed signal advantages; but every blessing was dashed with bitterness, and the suffering from what was withheld was more than the enjoyment from what he possessed. He was a man of the proudest descent; yet he was born in obscurity, and he went into the House of Lords, like an intruder, unknown, unwelcome. He was of high degree, but low estatea nobleman and man of fashion, so situated in his circumstances that his house was always beset with duns and bailiffs. 3. He was the most beautiful of men, with a deformity which humbled him to the dust. He had a sublime genius, but undisciplined and irregular-exquisite sensibility, but so perverted as to be alive only to suffering-and, in the full blaze of his glory, 1 Ti bē' ri us, the third emperor of Rome, born Nov. 16, 42 B. C., and died March 16, A. D. 37. 2 Timon, called the Misanthrope, an Athenian who lived in the latter part of the 5th century B. C. In consequence of the ingratitude of those he had benefited, he secluded himself from all the world except Alcibiades, and is said to have died from a broken limb which he refused to suffer a surgeon to set. He is the subject of Shakspeare's "Timon of Athens." the depreciation of the lowest of mankind was more painful to him than the applause of the highest was pleasing. He lived in the world, and for the world; nor is it often that a career so brief affords to biography so much impressive incident, or that the folly of an undisciplined and reckless spirit has assumed such a motley wear, and played off before God and man so many extravagant and fantastical antics. 4. On the other hand, there was, amidst all his irregularities, something strangely in'teresting-occasionally even grand and imposing-in Lord Byron's character and mode of life. His whole being was, indeed, to a remarkable degree extraordinary, fanciful, and fascinating. All that drew upon him the eyes of men, whether for good or evil-his passions and his genius, his enthusiasm and his woe, his triumphs and his downfall-spring from the same sōurce—a feverish temperament, a burning, distempered, insatiable imagination; and these, in their turn, acted most powerfully upon the imagination and the sensibility of others. 5. We well remember a time when we could never think of him ourselves but as an ideal being; a creature, to use his own words, "of loneliness and mystery," moving about the earth like a troubled spirit, and, even when in the midst of men, not of them; and it has often occurred to us, as we have seen Sir Walter Scott diligently hobbling up to his daily task in the Parliament House at Edinburgh, and still more when we have gazed upon him for hours seated down at his clerk's desk, with a countenance of most demure and business-like formality, to contrast him in that situation with the only man who had not been at that time totally overshadowed and eclipsed by his genius. 6. It was, indeed, a wonderful contrast! Never did two such men-competitors in the highest walks of creätive imagination and deep pathos-present such a strange antithesis of moral character, and domestic habits and pursuits, as Walter Scott at home and Lord Byron abroad. It was the difference between. prose and poetry; between the realities of existence and an incoherent though powerful and agitating romance'; between a falcon trained to the uses of a domestic bird, and some savage untamed eagle, who, after struggling with the bars of his cage, until his breast was bare and bleeding with agony, had flung himself fōrth once more upon the gale, and was again chasing befōre him the "whole herd of timorous and flocking birds," and making his native Alps, through all their solitudes, ring to his wild and boding scream. 2 7. Lord Byron's pilgrimage to distant and famous lands— especially his first-heightened this effect of his genius, and of his very peculiar mode of existence. Madame de Stael' ascribes it to his good fortune or his deep policy that Napoleon succeeded in associating his name with some of those objects which have, through all time, most strongly impressed the imaginations of men—with the Pyramids, the Alps, the Holy Land. Byron had the same advantage; his muse, like Horace's image of Care, mounted with him the steed and the gon'dola, the post-chaise and the packet-ship. His poems are, in a manner, the journal and common-place book of his wanderings. His sketches of the sublime and beautiful in nature seem to be mere images; or, so to express it, shadows thrown down upon his pages from the objects which he visited, only colored and illumined with such feelings, reflections, and associations as they naturally awaken in contemplative and susceptible minds. 8. His early visit to Greece, and the heartfelt enthusiasm with which he dwelt upon her loveliness, even "in her age of woe". upon the glory which once adorned, and that which might still. await her-have identified him with her name in a manner which subsequent events have made remarkable. He now appears to have been the herald of her resuscitation. The voice of lămentation, which he sent forth over Christendom, as if it had issued from all her caves, fraught with the woe and the wrongs of ages, and the deep vengeance which at length awoke, were not in vain. 9. His prose style has always appeared to us excellent. He expressed himself with all the freedom of literary table-talk, and one is surprised to find a man of so much and such extraordi 1 Baroness de Stael-Holstein, a French authoress, only child of Necker the Swiss banker and minister of finance to Louis XVI., was born in Paris, April 22, 1766, and died there, July 14, 1817. Her writings, 18 vols., appeared in 1820. "Corinne" is the work on which her literary reputation mainly rests. 2 Napoleon Bonaparte, first emperor of the French, was born at Ajaccio, capital of the island of Corsica, Aug. 15, 1769, and died at St. Helena, May 5th, 1821. |