"I AM PLEASED, AND YET I'M SAD."

WHEN twilight steals along the ground,

And all the bells are ringing round,
One, two, three, four, and five,

I at my study window sit,

And, rapt in many a musing fit,

To bliss am all alive.

But though impressions calm and sweet
Thrill round my heart a holy heat,

And I am inly glad,
The tear-drop stands in either eye,
And yet I cannot tell thee why,

I am pleased, and yet I'm sad.
The silvery rack that flies away
Like mortal life or pleasure's ray,

Does that disturb my breast?
Nay, what have I, a studious man,
To do with life's unstable plain,
Or pleasure's fading vest?

Is it that here I must not stop,
But o'er yon blue hill's woody top,
Must bend my lonely way?
No, surely no! for give but me
My own fire-side, and I shall be

At home where'er I stray.
Then is it that yon steeple there,
With music sweet shall fill the air,

When thou no more canst hear?
Oh, no! oh, no! for then forgiven
I shall be with my God in heaven,
Released from every fear.

Then whence it is I cannot tell,
But there is some mysterious spell

That holds me when I'm glad;
And so the tear-drop fills my eye,
When yet in truth I know not why,
Or wherefore, I am sad.

TO CONSUMPTION.

GENTLY, most gently, on thy victim's head,
Consumption, lay thine hand!-let me decay,
Like the expiring lamp, unseen, away,
And softly go to slumber with the dead.
And if 'tis true, what holy men have said,
That strains angelic oft foretell the day

Of death to those good men who fall thy prey,
O let the aërial music round my bed,
Dissolving sad in dying symphony,

Whisper the solemn warning in mine ear! That I may bid my weeping friends good-by Ere I depart upon my journey drear: And, smiling faintly on the painful past, Compose my decent head, and breathe my last.

THE STAR OF BETHLEHEM.

WHEN marshall'd on the nightly plain, The glittering host bestud the sky; One star alone, of all the train,

Can fix the sinner's wandering eye.

Hark! hark! to God the chorus breaks,
From every host, from every gem:
But one alone the Saviour speaks,
It is the Star of Bethlehem.

Once on the raging seas I rode,

The storm was loud-the night was dark, The ocean yawn'd-and rudely blow'd

The wind that toss'd my foundering bark.

Deep horror then my vitals froze,
Death-struck, I ceased the tide to stem;
When suddenly a star arose,—

It was the Star of Bethlehem.

It was my guide, my light, my all,
It bade my dark forebodings cease;
And through the storm and dangers' thrall,
It led me to the port of peace.

Now safely moor'd-my perils o'er,
I'll sing, first in night's diadem,
For ever and for evermore

The Star!-The Star of Bethlehem!

TO AN EARLY PRIMROSE.

MILD offspring of a dark and sullen sire!
Whose modest form, so delicately fine,
Was nursed in whirling storms,
And cradled in the winds;

Thee, when young spring first question'd winter's sway,

And dared the sturdy blusterer to the fight,

Thee on this bank he threw

To mark his victory.

In this low vale, the promise of the year,
Serene thou openest to the nipping gale,
Unnoticed and alone,

Thy tender elegance.

So virtue blooms, brought forth amid the storms
Of chill adversity: in some lone walk
Of life she rears her head,
Obscure and unobserved.

While every bleaching breeze that on her blows
Chastens her spotless purity of breast,

And hardens her to bear
Serene the ills of life.

GEORGE Gordon BYRON was born in London on the twenty-second of January, 1788. His father, who was a man of dissolute habits, quitted England in the following year, and soon afterward his mother retired to Aberdeen, where at an early age he was placed at a grammar school, in which he remained until the death of his great uncle, the sixth Lord BYRON, when (his father having previously died in France) he succeeded to the family title and estates, and removed to Newstead Abbey. Soon after this he was placed under the guardianship of the Earl of Carlisle, by whom he was sent to Harrow, where he remained about four years. He is described by Dr. DRURY, the head master here, as having been sensitive and diffident, and not easily governed except by gentle means. He did not excel in scholarship, but none of his school fellows, among whom were the present Sir ROBERT PEEL, Mr. PROCTOR, and others who have since been distinguished, were equal to him in general information. In his seventeenth year he was transferred to Trinity College, Cambridge. His general characteristics were still the same as at Harrow. He cared nothing for the honours of the university, and its discipline was not of a nature rightly to influence his conduct.

On leaving Cambridge BYRON resumed his residence at Newstead Abbey, a place rich in legendary associations, and situated in one of the most romantic districts of the country. He now published The Hours of Idleness, a collection of verses written during his college life, and remembered at this day chiefly on account of the severe criticism they received in the Edinburgh Review,* which lashed the dormant energies of the poet into action, and led to the composition of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, a satire in which he took ample vengeance not only upon his critics but upon nearly all the literary men of the day who were more fortunate than himself.

A circumstance occurred about this time which had a powerful influence upon BYRON'S future character. MARY CHAWORTH was pro

*This celebrated article was written by Lord Brougham.

| bably the only Englishwoman whom he ever loved. He had become acquainted with her soon after his removal from Scotland, and had never wholly abandoned the hope that his affection would be returned, until now, when he underwent the trial of seeing her married to another. She is the heroine of The Dream, and is alluded to in many of his sweetest verses, written in subsequent years.

Immediately after the publication of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, the noble author took his seat the first time in the House of Lords. He entered upon public life under peculiar and adverse circumstances. He was unknown in society, and there was no peer to present him in parliament. The loneliness of his position destroyed an incipient ambition of political eminence, and deepened the gloom and misanthropy which had been caused by earlier disappointments. He suddenly determined to travel, and leaving London with Mr. JOHN CAM HOBHOUSE, in July, 1809, he passed two years in Portugal, Spain, Greece, Turkey and Asia Minor. Approaching England in the summer of 1811, he wrote to a friend, "Embarrassed in my private, and indifferent to public affairs; solitary, without the wish to be social; with a body enfeebled by a succession of fevers, but a spirit and heart yet unbroken, I am returning home, without a hope, and almost without a desire." Before he reached Newstead his melancholy was increased by intelligence of the death of his mother, and within a few weeks he lost five more of his nearest friends and relations.

This depression gradually wore away. He employed himself in revising the poems he had written while abroad, and in March, 1812, when the author was but twenty-four years of age, England was electrified by the appearance of the first two cantos of Childe Harold. Alluding to the applause bestowed upon this work, he says tersely in his diary, "I awoke one morning and found myself famous." He became at once the idol of society. A few days before, he had made his first speech in parliament. It was praised by SHERIDAN,

and other eminent men, and its success might have incited him to seek political distinction, but for his far greater success as a poet, which immediately determined his subsequent career. Childe Harold was followed by The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara, and The Siege of Corinth, in quick succession, and each added to his gigantic reputation.

In January, 1815, Lord BYRON was married to a daughter of Sir RALPH MILBANKE. The union, it is well known, was not productive of happiness, and in the following year, after Lady BYRON had given birth to a daughter,* a separation took place. The public, with its customary impertinence, interfered, and it chose to side with the lady. Lord BYRON was libelled, persecuted, and driven from society. No man was ever more grievously wronged. As Mr. MACAULAY Well observes, first came the execution, then the investigation, and, last of all, the accusation. There was a quarrel, but there has never been any thing proved, or even alleged, to show that BYRON was more to blame than any other man who is on bad terms with his wife. He again quitted England for the continent, and with a determination never to return. Resuming his pen, he produced in the three succeeding years The Prisoner of Chillon, Manfred, The Lament of Tasso, Beppo, the last cantos of Childe Harold, and many shorter poems, which were received with almost universal applause.

He fixed his home in Venice, and there abandoned himself to every kind of pleasure. Under the influence of excesses his health decayed, and his hair turned gray. His mind, too, suffered sensible injury. Don Juan and some of his dramatic pieces contain many passages which only BYRON could have written, but his verse lost the energy for which it had been distinguished, and with his remarkable command of language passed away much of that delicate perception of the beautiful, which more than any thing else constitutes the poetical faculty.

Among BYRON's companions in Italy were SHELLEY and LEIGH HUNT, associated with whom he established a periodical paper called The Liberal; but after the publication of a few numbers, the plan was relinquished. The dead body of his friend SHELLEY he assisted in burning by the bay of Spezia; HUNT, with whom he had quarrelled, returned to England, ADA BYRON, now Countess of Lovelace.

and be directed his own eyes toward Greece, in contemplation of the last and noblest effort of his life. Sated with literary fame, weary of inaction, and thirsting for honourable distinction in a new field, he entered the Grecian camp, where his reception was like that of Lafayette in America, though more enthusiastic, more triumphant. Had he lived, he might have become eminent as a soldier and statesman; but anxiety, action and exposure induced disease, and on the nineteenth of March, 1824, seven months after his arrival in Cephalonia, he died at Missolonghi, in the thirtyseventh year of his age.

The admirable criticisms of MACAULAY and other late writers have placed BYRON in a more just position than could have been anticipated from the vague and partisan views that so long obtained respecting him. The world is fast learning to discriminate between his genius and character. The fervour of his poetry no longer blinds men to the fallacy of his moral code, nor is his life judged as formerly with heartless and intolerant severity. He had very many noble qualities; he was alive to tender and generous feelings, and performed numerous acts of disinterested liberality. His amours are the subject of the most melancholy chapter in his life, but they were less numerous and less dishonourable than has been supposed. His liaison with Madame GUICCIOLA, though by the standard of morality established on the shores of the Adriatic it might be called virtuous, was criminal; yet it is not to be visited with the censure which such a connection would deserve in England. In ByRON's early history, his unhappy education, his severe trials, and the capricious treatment he received from society, there is much to explain and to palliate his conduct. He knew the world, and his judgment of it was not very erroneous. He was indeed what almost any man of genius, exposed to such vicissitudes, might be expected to be, unless guided and restrained by religious principle. His writings present a variety of states of mind and conditions of feeling, and critics have pointed out in them what is respectively the offspring of blind passion and genuine sentiment. The descriptive portions of Childe Harold, the versification of the Corsair, and the pure melancholy of some of his occasional effusions, will always be warmly admired by many who can never sympathize with the misanthropic overflowings of a sceptical mind.

THE LAMENT OF TASSO.*

LONG years!-it tries the thrilling frame to bear
And eagle-spirit of a Child of Song—
Long years of outrage, calumny, and wrong;
Imputed madness, prison'd solitude,
And the mind's canker in its savage mood,
When the impatient thirst of light and air
Parches the heart; and the abhorred grate,
Marring the sunbeams with its hideous shade,
Works through the throbbing eyeball to the brain
With a hot sense of heaviness and pain;
And bare, at once, Captivity display'd
Stands scoffing through the never-open'd gate,
Which nothing through its bars admits, save day
And tasteless food, which I have eat alone
Till its unsocial bitterness is gone;
And I can banquet like a beast of prey,
Sullen and lonely, couching in the cave
Which is my lair, and-it may be my grave.
All this hath somewhat worn me, and may wear,
But must be borne. I stoop not to despair;
For I have battled with mine agony,
And made me wings wherewith to overfly
The narrow circus of my dungeon wall,
And freed the Holy Sepulchre from thrall;
And revell'd among men and things divine,
And pour'd my spirit over Palestine,
In honour of the sacred war for him,
The God who was on earth and is in heaven,
For he hath strengthen'd me in heart and limb.
That through this sufferance I might be forgiven,
I have employed my penance to record

How Salem's shrine was won, and how adored.
But this is o'er-my pleasant task is done :-
My long-sustaining friend of many years!
If I do blot thy final page with tears,
Know, that my sorrows have wrung from me none.
But thou, my young creation! my soul's child!
Which ever playing round me came and smiled,
And woo'd me from myself with thy sweet sight,
Thou too art gone-and so is my delight:
And therefore do I weep and inly bleed
With this last bruise upon a broken reed.
Thou too art ended-what is left me now?
For I have anguish yet to bear-and how?
I know not that-but in the innate force

Of my own spirit shall be found resource.
I have not sunk, for I had no remorse,

Nor cause for such: they call'd me mad-and why?
O Leonora! wilt not thou reply?
I was indeed delirious in my heart

To lift my love so lofty as thou art:
But still my frenzy was not of the mind;
I knew my fault, and feel my punishment
Not less because I suffer it unbent.

At Ferrara (in the library) are preserved the original MSS. of TAsso's Gierusalemme and of GUARINI's Pastor Fido, with letters of Tasso, one from TITIAN to ARIOSTO; and the inkstand and chair, the tomb and the house of the latter. But as misfortune has a greater interest for posterity, and little or none for the contemporary, the cell where Tasso was confined in the hospital of St. ANNA attracts a more fixed attention than the residence or the monument of ARIOSTO-at least it had this effect on me.

That thou wert beautiful, and I not blind,
Hath been the sin which shuts me from mankind;
But let them go, or torture as they will,
My heart can multiply thine image still;
Successful love may sate itself away,
The wretched are the faithful; 'tis their fate
To have all feeling save the one decay,
And every passion into one dilate,
As rapid rivers into ocean pour;

But ours is fathomless, and hath no shore.
Above me, hark! the long and maniac cry
Of minds and bodies in captivity.
And hark! the lash and the increasing howl,
And the half-inarticulate blasphemy!
There be some here with worse than frenzy foul,
Some who do still goad on the o'er-labour'd mind,
And dim the little light that's left behind
With needless torture, as their tyrants will
Is wound up to the lust of doing ill;

With these and with their victims am I class'd,
Mid sounds and sights like these long years have

pass'd;

Mid sights and sounds like these my life may close: So let it be for then I shall repose.

I have been patient, let me be so yet;

I had forgotten half I would forget,

But it revives-oh! would it were my lot
To be forgetful as I am forgot!-

Feel I not wroth with those who bade me dwell
In this vast lazar-house of many woes?
Where laughter is not mirth, nor thought the mind,
Nor words a language, nor even men mankind;
Where cries reply to curses, shrieks to blows,
And each is tortured in his separate hell―
For we are crowded in our solitudes-
Many, but each divided by the wall,

Which echoes Madness in her babbling moods;-
While all can hear, none heeds his neighbour's

call

None! save that One, the veriest wretch of all,
Who was not made to be the mate of these,
Nor bound between Distraction and Disease.
Feel I not wroth with those who placed me here?
Who have debased me in the minds of men,
Debarring me the usage of my own,
Blighting my life in best of its career,
Branding my thoughts as things to shun and fear?
Would I not pay them back these pangs again,
And teach them inward sorrow's stifled groan?
The struggle to be calm, and cold distress,
Which undermines our stoical success?
No!-still too proud to be vindictive-I
Have pardon'd princes' insults, and would die.
Yes, sister of my sovereign! for thy sake
I weed all bitterness from out my breast,
It hath no business where thou art a guest;
Thy brother hates-but I can not detest;
Thou pitiest not-but I can not forsake.
Look on a love which knows not to despair,
But all unquench'd is still my better part,
Dwelling deep in my shut and silent heart
As dwells the gather'd lightning in its cloud,
Encompass'd with its dark and rolling shroud,
Till struck-forth flies the all-ethereal dart!
And thus at the collision of thy name