LESSON CIX. THE WINDS. WE come! we come! and ye feel our might, Like the spirit of liberty, wild and free, Ye mark, as we vary our forms of power, When the hare-bell moves, and the rush is bent, And ye say it is we! but can ye trace And whether our breath be loud and high, And ye list, and ye look; but what do you see? Our dwelling is in the Almighty's hand; ; MISS H. F. GOULD. LESSON CX. MUSINGS. I WANDERED out one summer night, The moonbeams lay upon the hill, The shadows in the vale, One fleecy cloud upon the air Between me and the skies. I clapped my hands and warbled wild, For I was but a careless child, The waves came leaping o'er the sea, They linked their dimpled hands. They kissed my feet as quick as thought; Away the ripples flew ! The twilight hours like birds flew by, As lightly and as free; Ten thousand stars were in the sky, Ten thousand in the sea. That leaped upon the air, Had caught a star in its embrace, And held it trembling there. The young moon, too, with upturned sides, Her mirrored beauty gave, And as a bark at anchor rides She rode upon the wave. The sea was like the heaven above, As perfect and as whole, Save that it seemed to thrill with love, As thrills the immortal soul. The leaves, by spirit-voices stirred, Low murmurs, that my spirit heard, The flowers all folded to their dreams, They closed their eyes and went to sleep, No costly raiment round them shone, Yet Solomon, upon his throne, I heard the laughing wind behind, How cool and moist they were! I never heard such sounds before, Then wherefore weave such strains as these, And sing them day by day, When every bird upon the breeze, Can sing a sweeter lay? I'd give the world for their sweet art, The simple, the divine; I'd give the world to melt one heart, As they have melted mine. MRS. A. B. WELBY. LESSON CXI. BYRON AND HIS POETRY. NEVER had any writer so vast a command of the whole eloquence of scorn, misanthropy, and despair. That Marah was never dry. No art could sweeten, no draughts could exhaust its perennial waters of bitterness. Never was there such variety of monotony as that of Byron. From maniac laughter to piercing lamentation, there was not a single note of human anguish of which he was not master. Year after year, and month after month, he continued to repeat, that to be wretched is the destiny of all; that to be eminently wretched is the destiny of the eminent; that all the desires by which we are cursed, lead alike to misery; if they are not gratified, to the misery of disappointment; if they are gratified, to the misery of satiety. He always describes himself as a man of the same kind with his favorite creations; as a man whose heart had been withered, whose capacity for happiness was gone, and could not be restored; but whose invincible spirit dared the worst that could befall him here or hereafter. How much of this morbid feeling sprang from an original disease of mind, how much from real misfortune, how much from the nervousness of dissipation, how much of it was fanciful, how much of it was merely affected, it is impossible for us, and would probably have been impossible for the most intimate friends of Lord Byron, to decide. Whether there ever existed, or can ever exist, a person answering to the description which he gave of himself, may be doubted; but that he was not such a person is beyond all doubt. It is ridiculous to imagine that a man, whose mind really was imbued with scorn of his fellow-creatures, would have published three or four books every year to tell them so; or that a man who could say with truth, that he neither sought sympathy nor needed it, would have admitted all Europe to hear his farewell to his wife, and his blessings on his child. In the second canto of Childe Harold, he tells us that he is insensible to fame and obloquy: "Ill may such contest now the spirit move, Which heeds nor keen reproof nor partial praise." Yet we know, on the best evidence, that, a day or two before he published these lines, he was greatly, nay, indeed, childishly elated, by the compliments paid to his maiden speech in the House of Lords. Among the large class of young persons, whose reading is almost entirely confined to works of imagination, the popularity of Lord Byron was unbounded. They bought pictures of him, they treasured up the smallest relics of him; they learned his poems by heart, and did their best to write like him, and to look like him. Many of them practiced at the glass, in the hope of catching the curl of the upper lip, and the scowl of the brow, which appear in some of his portraits. A few discarded their neckcloths in imitation of their great leader. For some years, the Minerva press sent forth no novel without a mysterious, unhappy, Lara-like peer. The number of hopeful undergraduates, and medical students who became things of dark imaginings, on whom the freshness of the heart ceased to fall like dew, whose passions had consumed themselves to dust, and to whom the relief of tears was denied, passes all calculation. This was not the worst. There was created, in the minds of many of these enthusiasts, a pernicious and absurd association between intellectual power and moral depravity. From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics, compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness. This affectation has passed away; and a few more years will destroy whatever yet remains of that magical potency which once belonged to the name of Byron. To our children he will be merely a writer; and their impartial judgment will appoint his place among writers, without regard to his rank, or to his private history. T. B. MACAULAY. IN no productions of modern genius, is the reciprocal influence of morals and literature more distinctly seen, than in those of the author of Childe Harold. His character produced the poems, and it cannot be doubted that his poems are adapted to produce such a character. His heroes speak a language supplied not more by imagination than by consciousness. They are not those machines, that, by a contrivance of the artist, send forth a music of their own; but instruments through |