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

eo T.t.b. [tres tres bien], but why insert here.—[MS. pencil.]

129 [In this stanza M. Darmesteter detects "l'accent Wordsworthien" prior to any "doses" as prescribed by Shelley, and quotes as a possible model the following lines from Beattie's Minstrel:—

      "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.]

ep ——and foaming linns to lean.—[MS. D. erased.]

130 [There are none to bless us, for when we are in distress the great, the rich, the gay, shrink from us; and when we are popular and prosperous those who court us care nothing for us apart from our success. Neither do they bless us, or we them.]

eq This is to live alone—This, This is solitude.—[MS. D.]

131 [The MS. of stanza xxvii. is on the fly-leaf of a bound volume of proof-sheets entitled "Additions to Childe Harold," It was first published in the seventh edition, 1814. It may be taken for granted that Byron had seen what he describes. There is, however, no record of any visit to Mount Athos, either in his letters from the East or in Hobhouse's journals.

      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.)]

132 ["Le sage Mentor, poussant Télémaque, qui était assis sur le bord du rocher, le précipite dans le mer et s'y jette avec lui.... Calypso inconsolable, rentra dans sa grotte, qu'elle remplit de ses hurlements."—Fénelon's Télémaque, vi., Paris, 1837. iii. 43.]

133 [For Mrs. Spencer Smith, see Letters, 1898, i. 244, 245, note. Moore (Life, pp. 94, 95) contrasts stanzas xxx.-xxxv., with their parade of secret indifference and plea of "a loveless heart," with the tenderness and warmth of his after-thoughts in Albania ("Lines composed during a Thunderstorm," etc.), and decides the coldness was real, the sentiment assumed. He forgets the flight of time. The lines were written in October, 1809, within a month of his departure from "Calypso's isles," and the Childe Harold stanzas belong to the early spring of 1810. "Ou sont les neiges d'antan?" Moreover, he speaks by the card. Writing at Athens, January 16, 1810, he tells us, "The spell is broke, the charm is flown."]

134 [More than one commentator gravely "sets against" this line—Byron's statement to Dallas (Corr. of Lord Byron, Paris, 1824, iii. 91), "I am not a Joseph or a Scipio; but I can safely affirm that never in my life I seduced any woman." Compare Memoirs of Count Carlo Gozzi, 1890, ii. 12, "Never have I employed the iniquitous art of seduction ... Languishing in soft and thrilling sentiments, I demanded from a woman a sympathy and inclination of like nature with my own. If she fell ... I should have remembered how she made for me the greatest of all sacrifices.... I should have worshipped her like a deity. I could have spent my life's blood in consoling her; and without swearing eternal constancy, I should have been most stable on my side in loving such a mistress."]

er Brisk Impudence——.—[MS.]

es Youth wasted, wretches born——.—[MS. erased.]

135 [Compare Lucretius, iv. 1121-4—

      "Adde quod absumunt viris pereuntque labore,

      Labitur interea res, et Babylonica fiunt:

       Languent officia, atque ægrotat fama vacillans."]

et Climes strange withal as ever mortal head.—[MS.]

eu Suspected in its little pride of thought.—[MS. erased.]

136 ["Were counselled or advised." The passive "were ared" seems to lack authority. (See N. Eng. Dict., art. "Aread.")]

ev

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

137 [Compare the description of the thunderstorm in the Alps (Canto III. stanzas xcii.-xcvi., pp. 273-275); and Manfred, act ii. sc. 2—

      "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