In the very singular, and, we suspect, very imperfect poem, of which we are about to give a short account, Lord Byron has pursued the same course as in the third canto of Childe Harold, and put out his strength upon the same objects. The action is laid among the mountains of the Alps the characters are all, more or less, formed and swayed by the operations of the magnificent scenery around them, and every page of the poem teems with imagery and passion, though, at the same time, the mind of the poet is often overborne, as it were, by the strength and novelty of its own conceptions; and thus the composition, as a whole, is liable to many and fatal objections.

But there is a still more novel exhi

bition of Lord Byron's powers in this extraordinary drama. He has here burst into the world of spirits; and, in the wild delight with which the elements of nature seem to have inspired him, he has endeavoured to embody and call up before him their ministering agents, and to employ these wild Personifications, as he formerly employed the feelings and passions of man. We are not prepared to say, that, in this daring attempt, he has completely succeeded. We are inclined to think, that the plan he has conceived, and the principal Character which he has wished to delineate, would require a fuller developement than is here given to them; and accordingly, a sense of imperfection, incompleteness, and confusion, accompanies the mind throughout the perusal of the poem, owing either to some failure on the part of the poet, or to the inherent mystery of the subject. But though on that account it is difficult to comprehend distinctly the drift of the composition, and almost impossible to give any thing like a distinct account of it, it unquestionably exhibits many noble delineations of mountain scenery,many impressive and terrible pictures of passion, and many wild and awful visions of imaginary horror.

Manfred, whose strange and extraordinary sufferings pervade the whole drama, is a nobleman who has for many years led a solitary life in his castle among the Bernese Alps. From early youth he has been a wild misanthrope, and has so perplexed himself with his views of human nature, that he comes at last to have no fixed

principles of belief on any subject,-to be perpetually haunted by a dread of the soul's mortality, and bewildered among dark and gloomy ideas concerning the existence of a First Cause. We cannot do better than let this mysterious personage speak for himself. In a conversation, which we find him holding by the side of a mountain-cataract, with the " Witch of the Alps," whom he raises up by a spell "beneath the arch of the sun-beam of the torrent," we find him thus speaking :

"Man. Well, though it torture me, 'tis but the same;

t

My Pang shall find a voice. From my youth upwards

My spirit walk'd not with the souls of men, Nor look'd upon the earth with human eyes; The thirst of their ambition was not mine, The aim of their existence was not mine;

My joys, my griefs, my passions, and my

powers,

Made me a stranger; though I wore the form,

I had no sympathy with breathing flesh,
Nor midst the creatures of clay that guided
Was there but one who-but of her anon.
I said, with men, and with the thoughts of

me

These were my pastimes, and to be alone;
For if the beings, of whom I was one,-
Hating to be so,-cross'd me in my path,
I felt myself degraded back to them,
And was all clay again. And then I dived,
In my lone wanderings, to the caves of death,
Searching its cause in its effect; and drew
From wither'd bones, and sculls, and heap'd
up dust,

Conclusions most forbidden. Then I pass'd
The nights of years in sciences untaught,
Save in the old time; and with time and toil,
And terrible ordeal, and such penance
As in itself hath power upon the air,
And spirits that do compass air and earth,
Space and the peopled infinite, I made
Mine eyes familiar with Eternity."'-

In another scene of the drama, where

Where the eye cannot follow thee; but thine
Yet pierces downward, onward, or above,
With a pervading vision.Beautiful!
How beautiful is all this visible world!
How glorious in its action and itself!
But we, who name ourselves its sovereigns,

we,

Half dust, half deity, alike unfit

To sink or soar, with our mixed essence make

A conflict of its elements, and breathe The breath of degradation and of pride, Contending with low wants and lofty will, Till our mortality predominates,

And men are what they name not to themselves,

And trust not to each other. Hark! the note,
[The shepherd's pipe in the distance is heard.
The natural music of the mountain reed-
For here the patriarchal days are not
A pastoral fable-pipes in the liberal air,
Mixed with the sweet bells of the sauntering

herd;

My soul would drink those echoes.-Oh,

that I were

The viewless spirit of a lovely sound,
A living voice, a breathing harmony,
A bodiless enjoyment-born and dying
With the blest tone which made me!"

He is then, when standing on the toppling cliff, seized with an irresistible desire to fling himself over, but a chamois-hunter very opportunely comes in, and by force prevents him from effecting his purpose. This intervention is, we think, altogether absurd. They descend from the cliff quietly together; and so the scene, very dully and unnaturally, comes to a conclusion. It has been remarked of suicides, that if they are hindered from committing the crime in the very mode which they have determined upon, the strong desire of death may continue upon them, and yet the miserable, beings have no power to adopt a different scheme of destruction. If, therefore, Manfred had been suddenly forced away from cliff and precipice, we can suppose that he might, in another scene, have forborne his suicidal intentions; but it seems most unnatural, that he shall continue to descend cau

tiously the very rocks over which he had a moment before determined to fling himself, accept of assistance from the chamois-hunter, and exhibit every symptom of a person afraid of losing his footing, and tumbling down the crags. Besides, Manfred was not an ordinary character; and this extreme irresolution, after he had worked himself up to frenzy, is wholly inconsistent with his nature. VOL. I.

The first scene of the second act is in the chamois-hunter's cottage, and with the exception of the few lines formerly quoted, and some others, it is very unlike Lord Byron, for it is incredibly dull and spiritless; and the chamois-hunter, contrary to truth, nature, and reason, is a heavy, stupid, elderly man, without any conversational talents. The following lines, however, may redeem even a worse scene than this. Manfred speaks. "Think'st thou existence doth depend on time?

:

It doth but actions are our epochs. Mine Have made my days and nights imperishable,

Endless, and all alike, as sands on the shore, Innumerable atoms; and one desert,

Barren and cold, on which the wild waves

break,

Rocks, and the salt-surf weeds of bitterness." But nothing rests, save carcases and wrecks,

Scene second gives us Manfred's first interview with the Witch of the Alps, and he pours out his soul to her in a strain of very wild and empassioned poetry. Her appearance is described in a style different from the rest of the poem, and nothing can be more beautiful.

"Man. Beautiful Spirit! with thy hair of light

And

dazzling eyes of glory, in whose form The charms of Earth's least-mortal daugh To an unearthly stature, in an essence purer elements; while the hues of

of

ters grow

youth,

Carnation'd like a sleeping infant's cheek, Rock'd by the beating of her mother's heart, Or the rose-tints which summer's twilight

leaves

Beautiful Spirit! in thy calm clear brow,
Wherein is glass'd serenity of soul,
Which of itself shows immortality,
I read that thou wilt pardon to a son
Of Earth, whom the abstruser powers permit
At times to commune with them-if that he
And gaze on thee a moment.
Avail him of his spells-to call thee thus,

The Witch, however, cannot do any thing for him, and is commanded to vanish, and the scene ends with a soliloquy. In this he says

"I have one resource

Still in my science-I can call the dead,. And ask them what it is we dread to be; The sternest answer can but be the grave, And that is nothing-if they answer not." 2 P

In scene third, which is again on the summit of the Jungfrau mountain, Manfred does not appear at all, but it is wholly occupied by the Destinies and Nemesis. These very awful abstractions exult together over the miseries and madness of the world; and one of them sings either a triumphal song upon Buonaparte's return from Elba, and the bloody field of Waterloo, or a prophetic strain on his destined escape from St Helena, and the rivers of blood which are yet to overflow France.-His Lordship's imagination seems to be possessed by this throne-shattering emperor. The following passage is a specimen of the song in which the Destinies express themselves.

and bright;

And here on snows, where never human foot
Of common mortal trod, we nightly tread,
And leave no traces; o'er the savage sea,
The glassy ocean of the mountain ice,
We skim its rugged breakers, which put on
The aspect of a tumbling tempest's foam,
Frozen in a moment-a dead whirlpool's
image;

And this most steep fantastic pinnacle,
The fretwork of some earthquake-where
the clouds

Pause to repose themselves in passing by
Is sacred to our revels, or our vigils.'

Nemesis utters a higher strain.
Nem. "I was detained repairing shattered
thrones,

Marrying fools, restoring dynasties,
Avenging men upon their enemies,
And making them repent their own revenge,
Goading the wise to madness; from the dull
Shaping out oracles to rule the world
Afresh, for they were waxing out of date,
And mortals dared to ponder for themselves,
To weigh kings in the balance, and to speak
Of freedom, the forbidden fruit.-Away!
We have outstaid the hour-mount we our
clouds ?"

In scene fourth we are introduced into the hall of Arimanes, Prince of Earth and Air, who is sitting, sur→ rounded by the Spirits, on his throne, a globe of fire. The seven spirits chaunt a wild song in his praise,-the Destinies and Nemesis join in the glorification; and meanwhile Manfred enters, unappalled by the threatening visages of this dread assemblage. Nemesis asks,

Uncharnel?

Whom wouldst thou,

Man. One without a tomb-call up Astarte."

At the invocation of a spirit, her phantom rises and stands in the midst

Too much, as I loved thee; we were not made

To torture thus each other, though it were
The deadliest sin to love as we have loved.
Say that thou loath'st me not that I do bear
This punishment for both-that thou wilt be
One of the blessed-and that I shall die,
For hitherto all hateful things conspire
To bind me in existence-in a life
Which makes me shrink from immortality...
A future like the past. I cannot rest,
I know not what I ask, nor what I seek:"
I feel but what thou art-and what I am;
And I would hear yet once before I perish,
The voice which was my music-Speak to
me!

For I have called on thee in the still night, Startled the slumbering birds from the hushed boughs,

And woke the mountain wolves, and made the caves

Acquainted with thy vainly echoed name, Which answered me--many things, answer ed me

Spirits and men-but thou wert silent all. Yet speak to me! I have outwatched the stars, And gazed o'er Heaven in vain in search of