The Life of Lord Byron.

O'er the harp, from earliest years beloved,
He threw his fingers hurriedly, and tones
Of melancholy beauty died away
Upon its strings of sweetness.

may be traced between Byron and Rousseau. Both are distinguished by the most ardent and vivid delineation of intense conception, and by an intense sensibility of passion rather than of

held a dominion over the sympathy of their readers, far beyond the range of those ordinary feelings which are usually excited by the mere efforts of genius. The impression of this interest still accompanies the perusal of their writings; but there is another interest, of more lasting and far stronger power, which each of them possessed,

It was reserved for the present age to produce one distinguished example of the Muse having descended upon a bard of a wounded spirit, and lent her lyre to tell afflictions of no ordinary description, afflictions originating probably in that affection. Both, too, by this double power, have singular combination of feeling with imagination which has been called the poetical temperament, I and which has so often saddened the days of those ten whom it has been conferred. If ever a man was [entitled to lay claim to that character in all its ¦ strength and all its weakness, with its unbounded range of enjoyment, and its exquisite sensibility of pleasure and of pain, that man was Lord Byron. Nor do it require much time or a deep acquaintiance with human nature to discover why these extraordinary powers should in so many cases have contributed more to the wretchedness than to the happiness of their possessor.

which lies in the continual embodying of the individual character, it might almost be said of the very person of the writer. When we speak or think of Rousseau or Byron, we are not conscious of speaking or thinking of an author. We have a vague but impassioned remembrance of The imagination all compact which the men of surpassing genius, eloquence, and power, greatest poet who ever lived has assigned as the - of prodigious capacity both of misery and distinguishing badge of his brethren, is in every happiness. We feel as if we had transiently met case a dangerous gift. It exaggerates, indeed, such beings in real life, or had known them in our expectations, and can often bid its possessor the dim and dark communion of a dream. Each hope, where hope is lost to reason; but the delu- of their works presents, in succession, a fresh Isive pleasure arising from these visions of ima- idea of themselves; and, while the productions of gination resembles that of a child whose notice other great men stand out from them, like someis attracted by a fragment of glass to which a thing they have created, theirs, on the contrary, san-beam has given momentary splendour. He are images, pictures, busts of their living selves, hastens to the spot with breathless impatience, clothed, no doubt, at different times, in difand finds the object of his curiosity and expec-ferent drapery, and prominent from a different tation is equally vulgar and worthless. Such is back-ground,—but uniformly impressed with the ¡the man of quick and exalted powers of imagi- same form, and mien, and lineaments, and not nation: his fancy over-estimates the object of his to be mistaken for the representations of any wishes; and pleasure, fame, distinction, are alter- other of the children of men. nately pursued, attained, and despised when in But this view of the subject, though universally his power. Like the enchanted fruit in the felt to be a true one, requires perhaps a little expalace of a sorcerer, the objects of his admiration planation. The personal character of which we lose their attraction and value as soon as they have spoken, it should be understood, is not altoare grasped by the adventurer's hand, and all gether that on which the seal of life has been set, that remains is regret for the time lost in the -and to which, therefore, moral approval or chase, and astonishment at the hallucination un-condemnation is necessarily annexed, as to the der the influence of which it was undertaken. language or conduct of actual existence. It is the The disproportion between hope and possession character, so to speak, which is prior to conduct, which is felt by all men, is thus doubled to those and yet open to good and to ill,-the constituwhom nature has endowed with the power of tion of the being in body and in soul. Each of gilding a distant prospect by the rays of ima- these illustrious writers has, in this light, filled gination. his works with expressions of his own character, We think that many points of resemblance has unveiled to the world the secrets of his own

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