Lord Byron

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (With Byron's Biography)


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target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_34bb0877-2dd6-574c-a947-e42c8debf327">eo T.t.b. [tres tres bien], but why insert here.—[MS. pencil.]

      "And oft the craggy cliff he lov'd to climb,

       When all in mist the world below was lost,

       What dreadful pleasure! there to stand sublime,

       Like shipwreck'd mariner on desert coast,

       And view th' enormous waste of vapour, tost

       In billows, lengthening to th' horizon round,

       Now scoop'd in gulfs, with mountains now emboss'd!

       And hear the voice of mirth, and song rebound,

       Flocks, herds, and waterfalls, along the hoar profound."

      In felicity of expression, the copy, if it be a copy, surpasses the original; but in the scope and originality of the image, it is vastly inferior. Nor are these lines, with the possible exception of line 3—"Where things that own not Man's dominion dwell," at all Wordsworthian. They fail in that imaginative precision which the Lake poets regarded as essential, and they lack the glamour and passion without which their canons of art would have profited nothing. Six years later, when Byron came within sound of Wordsworth's voice, he struck a new chord—a response, not an echo. Here the motive is rhetorical, not immediately poetical.]

      The actual mount, "the giant height [6350 feet], rears itself in solitary magnificence, an insulated cone of white limestone." "When it is seen from a distance, the peninsula [of which the southern portion rises to a height of 2000 feet] is below the horizon, and the peak rises quite solitary from the sea." Of this effect Byron may have had actual experience; but Hobhouse, in describing the prospect from Cape Janissary, is careful to record that "Athos itself is said to be sometimes visible in the utmost distance (circ. 90 miles), but it was not discernible during our stay on the spot." (Murray's Handbook for Greece, p. 843; Childe Harold, edited by H. F. Tozer, p. 233; Travels in Albania, 1858, ii. 103. Compare, too, the fragment entitled the Monk of Athos, first published in the Hon. Roden Noel's Life of Lord Byron, 1890.)]

      "Adde quod absumunt viris pereuntque labore,

      Labitur interea res, et Babylonica fiunt:

       Languent officia, atque ægrotat fama vacillans."]

      Her not unconscious though her weakly child. or, ——her rudest child.—[MS. erased.]

      "My joy was in the wilderness; to breathe

       The difficult air of the iced mountain-top—

      In them my early strength exulted; or

       To follow through the night the moving moon,

       The stars and their development; or catch

       The dazzling lightnings till my eyes grew dim."

      Beattie, who describes the experiences of his own boyhood in the person of Edwin in The Minstrel, had already made a like protestation—

      "In sooth he was a strange and wayward youth.

       Fond of each gentle and each dreadful scene.

       In darkness and in storm he found delight;

       Not less than when on ocean-wave serene

       The Southern sun diffus'd his dazzling sheen;

       Even sad vicissitude amus'd his soul."

      Kirke