That in the antique Oratory shook
His bosom in its solitude; and then-
As in that hour-a moment o'er his face
The tablet of unutterable thoughts

Was traced, and then it faded as it came,
And he stood calm and quiet, and he spoke
The fitting vows, but heard not his own words,
And all things reeled around him; he could see

160

Not that which was, nor that which should have been-
But the old mansion, and the accustomed hall,
And the remembered chambers, and the place,
The day, the hour, the sunshine, and the shade,
All things pertaining to that place and hour
And her who was his destiny, came back

And thrust themselves between him and the light:
What business had they there at such a time?

VII.

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
The Lady of his love;-Oh! she was changed
As by the sickness of the soul; her mind
Had wandered from its dwelling, and her eyes
They had not their own lustre, but the look
Which is not of the earth; she was become
The Queen of a fantastic realm; her thoughts
Were combinations of disjointed things;

170

wedding-suit spread out before him. In the same mood, he wandered about the grounds alone, till he was summoned for the ceremony, and joined, for the first time on that day, his bride and her family. He knelt down-he repeated the words after the clergyman; but a mist was before his eyes-his thoughts were elsewhere: and he was but awakened by the congratulations of the bystanders to find that he was -married."-Life, p. 272.

Medwin, too, makes Byron say (Conversations, etc., 1824, p. 46) that he "trembled like a leaf, made the wrong responses, and after the ceremony called her (the bride) Miss Milbanke." All that can be said of Moore's recollection of the "memoranda," or Medwin's repetition of so-called conversations (reprinted almost verbatim in Life, Writings, Opinions, etc., 1825, ii. 227, seq., as "Recollections of the Lately Ďestroyed Manuscript," etc.), is that they tend to show that Byron meant The Dream to be taken literally as a record of actual events. He would not have forgotten by July, 1816, circumstances of great import which had taken place in December, 1815; and he is either lying of malice prepense or telling an ower true tale."]

And forms, impalpable and unperceived
Of others' sight, familiar were to hers.
And this the world calls frenzy ; but the wise
Have a far deeper madness-and the glance
Of melancholy is a fearful gift;

What is it but the telescope of truth?
Which strips the distance of its fantasies,
And brings life near in utter nakedness,
Making the cold reality too real! 1

180

VIII.

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
The Wanderer was alone as heretofore,
The beings which surrounded him were gone,
Or were at war with him; he was a mark
For blight and desolation, compassed round
With Hatred and Contention; Pain was mixed
In all which was served up to him, until,
Like to the Pontic monarch of old days,2
He fed on poisons, and they had no power,

i.

the glance

Of melancholy is a fearful gift;

For it becomes the telescope of truth,

And shows us all things naked as they are.—[MS.]

1. [Compare

"Who loves, raves-'tis youth's frenzy-but the cure
Is bitterer still, as charm by charm unwinds
Which robed our idols, and we see too sure

Nor Worth nor Beauty dwells from out the mind's
Ideal shape of such."

Childe Harold, Canto IV. stanza cxxiii. lines 1-5,

190

Poetical Works, 1899, ii. 420.]

2. Mithridates of Pontus. [Mithridates, King of Pontus (B. C. 12063), surnamed Eupator, succeeded to the throne when he was only eleven years of age. He is said to have safeguarded himself against the designs of his enemies by drugging himself with antidotes against poison, and so effectively that, when he was an old man, he could not poison himself, even when he was minded to do so-"ut ne volens quidem senex veneno mori potuerit.”—Justinus, Hist., lib. xxxvii. cap. ii.

According to Medwin (Conversations, p. 148), Byron made use of the same illustration in speaking of Polidori's death (April, 1821), which was probably occasioned by poison administered to himself" (see Letters, 1899, iii. 285).]

with the stars

But were a kind of nutriment; he lived
Through that which had been death to many men,
And made him friends of mountains:
And the quick Spirit of the Universe 2
He held his dialogues; and they did teach
To him the magic of their mysteries;
To him the book of Night was opened wide,
And voices from the deep abyss revealed 3
A marvel and a secret-Be it so.

IX.

My dream was past; it had no further change.
It was of a strange order, that the doom

Of these two creatures should be thus traced out
Almost like a reality-the one

To end in madness-both in misery.

200

July, 1816.

[First published, The Prisoner of Chillon, etc., 1816.]

I. [Compare

"Where rose the mountains, there to him were friends."

2. [Compare

Childe Harold, Canto III. stanza xiii. line 1.

.. and to me

High mountains are a feeling."

Ibid., stanza lxxii. lines 2, 3,

Poetical Works, 1899, ii. 223, 261.]

"Ye Spirits of the unbounded Universe!"

Manfred, act i. sc. 1, line 29, vide post, p. 86.]

3. [Compare Manfred, act ii. sc. 2, lines 79-91; and ibid., act iii. sc. 1, lines 34-39; and sc. 4, lines 112-117, vide post, pp. 105, 121, 135.]

DARKNESS.. 1

I HAD a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars

i. In the original MS. A Dream.

1. [Sir Walter Scott (Quarterly Review, October, 1816, vol. xvi. p. 204) did not take kindly to Darkness. He regarded the "framing of such phantasms" as "a dangerous employment for the exalted and teeming imagination of such a poet as Lord Byron. The waste of boundless space into which they lead the poet, the neglect of precision which such themes may render habitual, make them in respect to poetry what mysticism is to religion." Poetry of this kind, which recalled "the wild, unbridled, and fiery imagination of Coleridge," was a novel and untoward experiment on the part of an author whose " 'peculiar art" it was "to show the reader where his purpose tends." The resemblance to Coleridge is general rather than particular. It is improbable that Scott had ever read Limbo (first published in Sibylline Leaves, 1817), an attempt to depict the "mere horror of blank noughtat-all;" but it is possible that he had in his mind the following lines (384-390) from Religious Musings, in which "the final destruction is impersonated" (see Coleridge's note) in the "red-eyed Fiend :"

"For who of woman born may paint the hour,
When seized in his mid course, the Sun shall wane,
Making the noon ghastly! Who of woman born
May image in the workings of his thought,
How the black-visaged, red-eyed Fiend outstretched
Beneath the unsteady feet of Nature groans

In feverous slumbers?"

Poetical Works, 1893, p. 60.

Another and a less easily detected source of inspiration has been traced (see an article on Campbell's Last Man, in the London Magazine and Review, 1825, New Series, i. 588, seq.) to a forgotten but once popular novel entitled The Last Man, or Omegarus and Syderia, a Romance in Futurity (two vols. 1806). Kölbing (Prisoner of Chillon, etc., pp. 136-140) adduces numerous quotations in support of this contention. The following may serve as samples: "As soon as the earth had lost with the moon her guardian star, her decay became more rapid. . . Some, in their madness, destroyed the instruments of husbandry, others in deep despair summoned death to their relief. Men began to look on each other with eyes of enmity" (i. 105). "The sun exhibited signs of decay, its surface turned pale, and its beams were frigid. The northern nations dreaded perishing by intense cold . . . and fled to the torrid zone to court the sun's beneficial rays" (i. 120). "The reign of Time was over, ages of Eternity were going to begin; but at the same moment Hell shrieked with rage, and the sun and stars were extinguished. The gloomy night of chaos enveloped the world, plaintive sounds issued from

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy Earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

Morn came and went-and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread

Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chilled into a selfish prayer for light:

And they did live by watchfires-and the thrones, ΙΟ
The palaces of crownéd kings-the huts,

The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons ; cities were consumed,
And men were gathered round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other's face;
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch :
A fearful hope was all the World contained;
Forests were set on fire-but hour by hour
They fell and faded-and the crackling trunks
Extinguished with a crash-and all was black.
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits

The flashes fell upon them; some lay down

20

mountains, rocks, and caverns,-Nature wept, and a doleful voice was heard exclaiming in the air, The human race is no more!'" (ii. 197). It is difficult to believe that Byron had not read, and more or less consciously turned to account, the imagery of this novel; but it is needless to add that any charge of plagiarism falls to the ground. Thanks to a sensitive and appreciative ear and a retentive memory, Byron's verse is interfused with manifold strains, but, so far as Darkness is concerned, his debt to Coleridge or the author of Omegarus and Syderia is neither more nor less legitimate than the debt to Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Joel, which a writer in the Imperial Magasine (1828, x. 699), with solemn upbraidings, lays to his charge.

The duty of acknowledging such debts is, indeed, "a duty of imperfect obligation." The well-known lines in Tennyson's Locksley Hall"Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue!"

is surely an echo of an earlier prophecy from the pen of the author of Omegarus and Syderia: "In the center the heavens were seen darkened by legions of armed vessels, making war on each other!... The soldiers fell in frightful numbers. . . Their blood stained the soft verdure of the trees, and their scattered bleeding limbs covered the fields and the roofs of the labourers' cottages" (i. 68). But such "conveyings" are honourable to the purloiner. See, too, the story of the battle between the Vulture-cavalry and the Sky-gnats, in Lucian's Vera Historia, i. 16.]