Dejected, and habitually disposed

To seek in degradation of her kind

Excuse and solace for her own defects.

He exemplifies in all his life, and in all his works, the habit of seeing the great in the small, the sublime in the vulgar, the strange in the common, the awful authority and charm of humanity in the poorest and most ignorant men, and God everywhere, a habit invaluable alike for wisdom, for virtue, for dignity, for peace, and for happiness. Fortunate every one who learns the secret!

He teaches us, finally, the restorative efficacy and charm of solitude, like a prophet familiar with all her secrets. To turn from a Heine to a Wordsworth is like changing attention from the roar and blaze of brothels, groggeries, and hells, to a nightingale warbling on a moonlit bough in heaven. What a strain he pours on the ears of the fops, loungers, gladiators, and slaves of time!

When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
How gracious, how benign, is solitude!
How potent a mere image of her sway!
Most potent when impressed upon the mind
With an appropriate human centre, a hermit,
Deep in the bosom of the wilderness;
Votary, in vast cathedral, where no foot
Is treading, where no other face is seen,
Kneeling at prayers; or watchman on the top
Of lighthouse beaten by Atlantic waves;
Or as the soul of that great Power is met
Sometimes embodied on a public road,
When, for the night deserted, it assumes
A character of quiet more profound
Than pathless wastes.

The immortal fame of Wordsworth is secure with the im mortal benefits he will render his docile readers. While Winander, Fairfield, and Rydal remain, to all visionary minds his wraith will haunt them; and as long as Derwent runs, it will murmur his name to the pilgrims on its banks. Men will have a more blessed and mysterious communion with nature, a more constant and pervading sense of the presence of God, a more firm and tender

love of their fellow-beings, because he has lived and sung. Fitly does Lowell say, referring to him: "Parnassus has two peaks the one where improvising poets cluster; the other, where the singer of deep secrets sits alone, a peak veiled sometimes from the whole morning of a generation by earth-born mists and smoke of kitchen fires, only to glow the more consciously at sunset, and after nightfall to crown itself with imperishable stars."

BYRON.

ANY list of the great solitary spirits of the world, not to be strikingly defective, must contain the name of Byron. He has written the best lines in the English language on the subject of solitude. His personality, full of fascinating interest, stands in relief from the mass of men. His experience furnishes instructive illustration of many of the conditions and consequences of spiritual isolation. We may in his example trace the dark secrets of unhappiness more clearly than almost anywhere else.

Byron was marked out from average humanity from his very birth. He inherited from both parents a "blood all meridian," on one side rich with voluptuous sensibility, on the other side tingling with vehement irritability. He had a dark, tempestuous passionateness of temperament, combining in the most singular manner a remarkably keen and abiding sense of himself with a remarkable freedom from the meannesses of selfishness, and an unusual susceptibility to noble thoughts and sentiments. The deceitfulness, fickleness, coldness, meanness which his sharp intelligence, aggravated by his morbid consciousness, taught him to trace in the characters and deeds of most of his associates, the great disparity between what he craved and what he found, very early gave a stronger warp and an intenser tinge to his natural bias towards loneliness and a melancholy brooding over his own thoughts. The brain of Byron, physiologically considered, was a wonderful organ. It was at once uncommonly powerful and uncommonly small. What fineness and firmness of

fibre, what compactness and vigor of cells, what profuseness of polarity it must have had! And in addition to the original concentrated strength of his highly charged nervous structure, everything in his circumstances and life contributed to heighten his genius by intensifying his mental polarities and disturbing their equilibrium. One distinguishing element in his self-consciousness was his rank. He was heir to a title giving him prominence among his fellows, yet without the better accompaniments of respectful deference and tenderness which should attend such a birth. His intellectual pride kept him from obtruding his titular supremacy. His generous democratic impulses and his contempt for the illustrious mediocrities of the peerage and the throne, made him disdainful of inherited insignia; yet in him the feeling of the peer ever lay underneath the feeling of the poet and fast by the feeling of the man. The poverty and neglect which shrouded his childhood lent a new acuteness to his feeling of his social and personal claims. His sufferings when first sent from home to school,-poor, proud, shy, affectionate, unknown, unfriended, unnoticed in the herd of boys, were pitiable. When by the death of a relative he succeeded to his ancestral honors, as the master called his name in school, for the first time with the prefix of lord, he burst into tears in the midst of his staring mates. A dark slough of mortified pride, created by his young school experience at Harrow, hung over his mind for years. There is a tomb in the churchyard at Harrow, commanding a view over Windsor, which was such a favorite resting-place with him that the boys called it Byron's tomb. Here he would sit for hours wrapt in thought, "brooding lonelily over the first stirrings of passion and genius in his soul, perhaps indulging in those forethoughts of fame, under the influence of which, when little more than fifteen years of age, he wrote ":

My epitaph shall be my name alone:

If that with honor fail to crown my clay,
O may no other fame my deeds repay !
That, only that, shall single out the spot,
By that remembered or with that forgot.

Another heightener of self-consciousness in Byron was his superb personal beauty. The romantic charm of his noble features, with the mystery of his genius, drew all eyes on him wherever he went, as soon as he had become known, and secured for him that flattery of attention and curiosity which cannot fail to react on its object. That he was fully conscious of this, and that it wrought on him with a keen force, is obvious from many particulars; among others from the pains he took with his toilet, shaving the hair off his temples, setting the fashion of the turned-down collar. This over-consciousness of himself was raised to a painful pitch by the slight malformation and lameness of one of his feet. "The embittering circumstance of his life," Moore says, "which haunted him like a curse, and, as he persuaded himself, counterbalanced all the blessings showered on him, was the trifling deformity of his foot." He once said mournfully to his friend Becher, who was trying to cheer him by the assurance of his great gifts, "Ah, my dear friend, if this (laying his hand on his forehead) places me above the rest of mankind, that (pointing to his foot) places me far, far below them." He said the "horror and humiliation " which came over him once in childhood, when his mother called him "a lame brat" were unutterable. He also once, on overhearing Mary Chaworth, of whom he was desperately enamored, say to a female friend, “Do you suppose I could love that lame boy?" darted out of the house in a state of frenzy, and fled into the solitude of the forest, where he stayed until late in the night.

The boyish sensibility of Byron was strangely empassioned, easily piqued, resentfully retentive of wrongs, slights, and pains. When his favorite schoolmate, young Lord Clare, expressed regret at the departure of another friend, Byron was tortured with jealousy. It affords the skilled psychologist a deep glimpse into the secrets of his bosom to know that he was bashful even to the end of his life, and had the habit of blushing. When staying in his boyhood at Mrs. Pigot's, if he saw strangers approaching the house, he would leap out of the window to avoid meeting them. The same trait is ascribed to himself by

Rousseau, with whom Byron had much in common, in spite of his elaborate disclaimer of the asserted likeness. It is also recorded of Virgil that his diffidence often caused him to beat a sudden retreat into shops, to escape the gaze of those who met him in the streets of Rome. Such a union of qualities always makes its possessor fond of seclusion, and gives him at least a superficial twist of misanthropy. The youngest muse of Byron sang to one of his earliest friends:

Dear Becher, you tell me to mix with mankind:
I cannot deny such a precept is wise:

But retirement accords with the tone of my mind,
And I will not descend to a world I despise.

It is affecting to see how soon a half sad, half angry soreness towards the world mingled with his strong and haughty boldness of self-assertion. On the death of his mother, nearly at the same time with that of his two friends, Matthews and Wingfield, he wrote to Hodgson, "I am solitary, and I never felt solitude irksome before." During his first journey in Greece, he said, his chief delight was to climb to some high rock above the sea, and remain there for hours, gazing on the sky and waters, lost in reverie. There are immortal passages in his poems which demonstrate how often and how sincerely he must have enjoyed this sombre luxury. When he testified, "My nature leads me to solitude, and every day adds to this disposition," his words expressed the simple truth, and no freak of affectation. His mind was cast in a deep and gloomy mould. Few could adequately sympathize with him. Conscious of this he strove to exaggerate it, with an emphatic liking for whatever emphasized his unlikeness from the human commonalty. He drew himself in such characters as a Childe Harold, "Apart he stalked in joyless reverie," a Conrad, a Lara "lord of himself, that heritage of woe," to exaggerate the more his contrast with other men, to make them wonder and tremble, to give a stronger charge to their awe and curiosity pertaining to him.

He took a dark delight in cherishing tragic ideas and