Sir Aubrey de Vere. Sir Aubrey de Vere (1788-1846) was a native of Curragh Chase, Limerick County, Ireland. He was educated at Harrow with Byron and Peel, but never entered a university. He was the author of two dramatic poems, "Julian the Apostate" (1822), and "The Duke of Mercia" (1823); also of "A Song of Faith, Devout Exercises, and other Poems" (1842). Sir Aubrey dedicates this last volume to Wordsworth, and says, in his letter, "To know that you have perused many of the following poems with pleasure, and did not hesitate to reward them with your praise, has been to me cause of unmingled happiness. In accepting the Dedication of this volume, you permit me to link my name-which I have hitherto done so little to illustrate-with yours, the noblest of modern literature." Sir Aubrey must not be confounded with his third son, Aubrey Thomas de Vere (born 1814), and also a poet of considerable note. CRANMER. Too feebly nerved for so severe a trial SONNETS ON COLUMBUS. Columbus always considered that he was inspired, and chosen for the great service of discovering a new world and conveying to it the light of salvation. I. The crimson sun was sinking down to rest, Caught and flashed back the varying tints of even ; When on a fragment from the tall cliff riven, II. He was a man whom danger could not daunt, He knew his fame was full, and blessed his God: SONNET. There is no remedy for time misspent ; III. Beautiful realm beyond the western main, foes! DIOCLETIAN AT SALONA. On being solicited by Maximian to reassume the imperial purple, Diocletian rejected the offer with a smile of pity, calmly observing that if he could show Maximian the cabbages which he had planted with his own hands at Salona, he should no longer be urged to relinquish the enjoyment of happiness for the pursuit of power. Take back these vain insignia of command, Though laurel-wreathed, War's desolating brand. I scorn thy base caresses. Welcome the roll Looks down on your degenerate Capitol! GLENGARIFF. A sun-burst on the bay! Turn and behold! Minstrels have sung. From rock and headland proud Lord Byron. George Gordon Noel Byron was born in London, January 224, 1788, and died at Missolonghi, Greece, April 19th, 1824, aged thirty-six years and three months. His father, Captain Byron, nephew to the possessor of the family title, was remarkable only for his dissoluteness and improvidence. At the age of five the future poet was a pupil at a day-school in Aberdeen. At ten he became a peer of the realm and possessor of Newstead Abbey. His mother was a woman of ungovernable passions, foolish and capricious, and her example had a dis astrous influence on her son. Byron went to Harrow, then to Cambridge. At nineteen, when still a student, he published a collection of verses, entitled "Hours of Idleness." A touch of lordly conceit at the close of the little book caused the Edinburgh Review to laugh at it. Byron retorted in a poem, "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," which gave unexpected evidence of the youth's real powers. Two years of foreign travel (18091811) led to the first two cantos of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," written at the age of two-and-twenty. In 1811 he returned to England, just in time to see his mother die. In 1812 Byron made his first speech in the House of Lords. "Childe Harold" had caused him, in his own words, "to wake up one morning, and find himself famous." It was followed by poem after poem. In January, 1815, he married Miss Milbanke; his daughter, Augusta Ada, was born December 10th of the same year; two months afterward his wife parted from him; and in April, 1816, he left England, never to return. He went first to Switzerland, where he wrote, the same year, the third canto of "Childe Harold" and the "The Prisoner of Chillon." In July, 1816, in his remarkable poem of "The Dream," he compared his luckless marriage with another that "might have been." In November, 1816, he went to Venice, then to Pisa and Genoa. Shelley's untimely death in 1822 affected him greatly. Before leaving Italy to espouse the cause of Greek independence, he wrote the fourth canto of "Childe Harold," "Beppo," ," " Manfred," " Mazeppa," "Cain," "Don Juan," and many other poems. A violent cold caught at Missolonghi ended his life. His remains were brought to England for interment. Burial in Westminster Abbey was refused, and they were deposited in the family vault in Hucknall Church, Nottinghamshire. Both in his emotional and his intellectual nature Byron shows the struggle of evil with good. In all his principal poems his men and women are pictures of himself; and to this inability to get out of the vicious circle of his own passions and prejudices may be attributed his failure as a dramatic writer. His success in attracting the public ear and eye of contemporaries was immeasurably beyond that of Wordsworth, but posterity has rectified the injustice: Wordsworth is now the more conspicuous figure. Emerson tells us that "Byron had nothing to say-and he said it beautifully." This may apply to him, considered as a philosopher, but not as a poet, in which capacity he exercises a genuine power over the emotional nature, with a mastery of apt, beautiful, and simple language excelled only by Shakspeare. Surely it requires as much intellectual power to give apt and eloquent voice to mountains, cataracts, tempests, oceans, ruins, and, above all, to the stormy emotions of the human heart,-making vivid the obscure and evasive, as to dip deep into transcendental subtleties or ethical speculations. Byron may have been overrated in his day, but his place in English literature must ever be in the front rank of the immortals. As Matthew Arnold says of him, "When Byron's eyes were shut in death In my youth's summer I did sing of one, The wandering outlaw of his own dark mind; Again I seize the theme then but begun, And bear it with me, as the rushing wind Bears the cloud onward: in that tale I find The furrows of long thought, and dried-up tears, Which, ebbing, leave a sterile track behind, O'er which all heavily the journeying years Plod the last sauds of life, where not a flower appears. Since my young days of passion--joy, or pain, To me, though to none else, a not ungrateful theme. He, who grown agéd in this world of woe, Why thought secks refuge in lone caves, yet rife With airy images, and shapes which dwell Still unimpaired, though old, in the soul's haunted cell. "Tis to create, and, in creating, live A being more intense, that we endow The life we image, even as I do now. Mixed with thy spirit, blended with thy birth, And feeling still with thee in my crushed feelings' dearth. Yet must I think less wildly:-I have thought Too long and darkly, till my brain became, In its own eddy boiling and o'erwrought, A whirling gulf of phantasy and flame: And thus, untaught in youth my heart to tame, My springs of life were poisoned. 'Tis too late! Yet am I changed; though still enough the same In strength to bear what time cannot abate, And feed on bitter fruits without accnsing fate. SCENES BY LAKE LEMAN. Ye stars, which are the poetry of heaven, In us such love and reverence from afar, That fortune, fame, power, life, have named themselves a star. All heaven and earth are still-though not in sleep, But breathless, as we grow when feeling most; And silent, as we stand in thoughts too deep:All heaven and earth are still: from the high host Of stars to the lulled lake and mountain-coast, All is concentered in a life intense, Where not a beam, nor air, nor leaf is lost, But hath a part of being, and a sense Of that which is of all Creator and defence. Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt In solitude, where we are least alone; |