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, me These were my pastimes, and to be alone; Conclusions most forbidden. Then I pass'd In another scene of the drama, where 1817. Review-Manfred. a pious old abbot vainly endeavours to administer to his troubled spirit the consolations of religion, he still farther illustrates his own character. "Man. Ay.-Father! I have had those And noble aspirations in my youth, Even in the foaming strength of its abyss, Abbot. Man. I could not tame my nature down ; for he Must serve who fain would sway-and And watch all time-and pry into all place- Abbot. And why not live and act with other Man. Because my nature was averse from And yet not cruel; for I would not make, o'er The barren sands which bear no shrubs to And revels o'er their wild and arid waves, But besides the anguish and perturbation produced by his fatal scepticism in regard to earth and heaven, vice and virtue, man and God,-Manfred's soul has been stained by one secret and dreadful sin, and is bowed down by the weight of blood. It requires to read the drama with more than ordinary attention, to discover the full import of those broken, short, and dark expressions, by which he half confesses, and half conceals, even from himself, the perpetration of this inexpiable guilt. In a conversation with a chamois-hunter, in his Alpine cottage, he thus suddenly breaks out: Man. Away, away! there's blood upon the brim! Will it then never-never sink in the earth? Man. I say 'tis blood-my blood! the pure warm stream Which ran in the veins of my fathers, and When we were in our youth, and had one And loved each other as we should not love, Where thou art not-and I shall never be." "My injuries came down on those who On those whom I best loved-I never quelled In the conversation formerly refer- But soften'd all, and temper'd into beauty; The quest of hidden knowledge, and a mind mine, Pity, and smiles, and tears-which I had not; Her faults were mine-her virtues were her own Flov'd her, and destroy'd her! Man. Not with my hand, but heart which broke her heart It gazed on mine, and withered. I have shed Blood, but not hers-and yet her blood was I saw shed and could not staunch it." From these, and several other passceived a mad and insane passion for his ages, it seems that Manfred had consister, named Astartè, and that she had, in consequence of their mutual guilt, committed suicide. This is the terrible soul-drives him into the mountaincatastrophe which for ever haunts his wilderness-and, finally, by the poignancy of unendurable anguish, forces See Sketch of a Tradition related by a Monk in Switzerland,' page 2703 him to seek intercourse with the Prince of the Air, witches, demons, destinies, spirits, and all the tribes of immaterial existences. From them he tries to discover those secrets into which his reason cannot penetrate. He commands them to tell him the mystery of the grave. The only being he ever loved has by his means been destroyed. Is all her beauty gone for ever-annihilated-and with it has her spirit faded into nonentity? or is she lost, miserably lost, and suffering the punishment brought on her by his own sin? We believe, that by carrying in the mind a knowledge of this one horrid event-and along with that, those ideas of Manfred's character, which, by the extracts we have given, better than any words of our own, the reader may be enabled to acquire,-the conduct of the drama, though certainly imperfectly and obscurely managed, may be understood, as well as its chief end and object. At the opening of the drama, we find Manfred alone, at midnight, in a Gothic gallery of his castle, in possession of a mighty spell, by which he can master the seven spirits of Earth, Ocean, Air, Night, the Mountains, the Winds, and the Star of his nativity. These spirits all appear before him, and tell him their names and employment. The Mountain Spirit thus speaks: "Mont Blanc is the monarch of mountains, Around his waist are forests braced, The Avalanche in his hand; I am the spirit of the place, Could make the mountain bow And quiver to its caverned base And what with me wouldst Thou?" language of his supernatural beings, * I hear The spirit of this star (the star of his nativity) appears in the shape of a beautiful female figure; and Manfred exclaims, "Oh God! if it be thus, and Thou And we again will be-[ The figure vanishes.] [Manfred falls senseless.” A voice is then heard singing an incantation and a curse, stanzas which were published in the noble Lord's last volume, and full of a wild and unearthly energy. In the second scene, Manfred is standing alone on a cliff on the mighty mountain Jungfrau, at sunrise; and this is part of his morning soliloquy. "Man. - -My mother Earth! Why are ye beautiful? I cannot love ye. Art a delight-thou shin'st not on my heart. I stand, and on the torrent's brink beneath And my brain reels and yet my foot is firm. There is a power upon me which withholds The Storm Spirit says, with equal And makes it my fatality to live; If it be life to wear within myself Thy prey, and gorge thine eaglets; thou art gone Where the eye cannot follow thee; but thine 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, herd; My soul would drink those echoes.-Oh, that I were The viewless spirit of a lovely sound, 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, 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 And this most steep fantastic pinnacle, Pause to repose themselves in passing by Nemesis utters a higher strain. Marrying fools, restoring dynasties, 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 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 |