BYRON'S ADDRESS TO THE OCEAN. CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE undertakes an Idea-that of a proud spirit, born in a castle, self-driven from the bosom of home, seeking refuge, solace, renovation, from Nature, of sensibilities worn out with enjoyment. Or, he brings into play a neglected, unused sensibility-the joy of the Sublime and the Beautiful. We receive, as given, a mind gifted with extraordinary powers of will and understanding by the favour of birth, nursed upon the heights of society-conversant with pleasure and passion; and, bearing all this constantly in mind, we must read the poem. From it large passages might be selected, in which the scorn, despite, bitterness that elsewhere break in, disfeaturing beauty and sublimity, are silent; and the passion of divine beholding stands out alone. Is this the character-or what is the character, of the celebrated concluding Address to the Ocean? Few things in modern poetry have been more universally-more indiscriminately admired; be it ours now to recite with you the famous Stanzas-and here, sitting beneath the sea-fronting porch of our Marine Villa, indulge in a confabulatory critique. The Wanderings are at an end. The real and the imaginary pilgrim, standing together upon Mount Albano, look out upon the blue Mediterranean. He has generously, honourably, magnani mously, thrown upon the ground the checkered mantle of scorn, anger, disappointment, sorrow, and ennui, which had wrapped in disguise his fair stature and features; and he stands a restored, or at least an escaped man, gazing with eye and soul upon the beautiful and majestic sea rolling in its joy beneath his feet. He looks; and he will deliver himself up, as Nature's lone enthusiast, to the delicious, deep, dread, exulting, holy passion ofvary the word as he varies it -The Ocean. Let us chant-with broken, though haply not unmusical voice-what may be called-the Hymn. That is a high term-let us not anticipate that it has been misapplied. Childe Harold, or Lord Byron-for it here little matters whether a grace of pleased fancy resolve the Two into One, or show the Two side by side, noble forms in brotherly reflection here is at last the powerful but self-encumbered Spirit with whom we have journeyed so long in sunlight and in storm-delighted, sympathising, wondering at least, or confounded and angry when he will not let us wonder-here He is at last himself, in unencumbered strength, setting like the sun upon the sea he gazes on-the clouds broken through, dispersed, and vanquished, even if a half-tinge of melancholy remembrance hang in the atmosphere, radiant in majestic farewell. "But I forget.-My pilgrim's shrine is won, And from the Alban Mount we now behold Our friend of youth, that Ocean, which when we Those waves, we follow'd on till the dark Euxine roll'd "Upon the blue Symplegades: long years Long, though not very many, since have done Their work on both; some suffering and some tears Have left us nearly where we had begun : 2 K "Oh! that the Desert were my dwelling-place In deeming such inhabit many a spot? Though with them to converse can rarely be our lot. "There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal. "Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean!-roll! "His steps are not upon thy paths-thy fields And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies, And send'st him, shivering in thy playful spray And dashest him again to earth ;-there let him lay. "The armaments which thunderstrike the walls These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake, "Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee- "Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form Calm or convulsed-in breeze, or gale, or storm, Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime "And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy These Stanzas may be separated from the Poem-the feeling of readers innumerable so separates them—as a HYMN TO THE OCEAN. The passage, a great effort of a great poet, intends a final putting forth of all his power -it has been acknowledged and renowned as such; and, if it has failed, a critique showing this, and showing the ground of the failure, may be useful to you, inexperienced yet in the criticism of poetry, though all alive to its charm. We observe you delight in the first Four Stanzas-ay, you recite them over again after us and the voice of youth, tremulous in emotion, is pathetic to the Old Man. He will not seek, by what might seem to you, thus moved, hypercritical objections to some of the words; but, pleased with your pleasure, he is willing to allow you to believe the stanzas entirely good in expression as in thought. For here the morbid disrelish of the sated palate is cleansed away. The obscuring cloud of the overwhelmed heart is dispersed. The joy of the wilderness here claimed is not necessarily more or other than that of every powerful and imaginative spirit, which experiences that solitude is, in simple truth, by a steadfast law of our nature, the condition under which our soul is able to wed itself in impassioned communion effectually to the glorious Universe where, too, the subjugating footsteps of man, impairing the pure domain of free nature, are not. "Pathless," "lonely,"-of them selves bespeak neither satiety nor hostility: there is "society by the deep sea, and music in its roar!" all quite right. Here is a heart, in its thirst for sympathy, peopling the desert with sympathisers. Here is expansion of the heart; and the spirit that rejoices in the consciousness of life roused into creative activity. For an ear untuned and untuning, here is one that listens out harmonies which you, languid or inept, might not discern. "Pleasure!""rapture!" "society !" "music !”—a chain of genialities! "I love not man the less, but nature more, From these our interviews." What will you require of kindliest humanity from any poet, from any lover of nature, that is not here? The savage grandeur of earth and sea have their peril-the fleeing of human homes and haunts-the voluptuous banishment self-imposed-the caressing of dear fancies in secret invisible recesses inviolable-these tend all to engendering and nurturing an excessive selfdelight akin to an usurping self-love; and the very sublimities of that wonderful intercourse, in which, upon the one part, stands the feeble dwarf Man, in his hour-lived weakness, and upon the other, as if Infinitude itself putting on cognisable forms, the imperishable Hills and the unchangeable Sea that intercourse in which he, the pigmy, conscious of the divinity within him, feels himself the greater - he infinite, immortal, and these finite and vanishing-the power and exultation sweetened. Or, if that be too much to say, at least man, with all the dissonance that hangs by his name and recollections, is forgotten, suspendedIf this for the time absolutely lost. be not the meaning, what is? of that intercourse may well engender and nourish Pride. Self-love and Pride, tempting, decoying, bewildering, devouring demons of the inhuman Waste! But the self-reproved, repentant pilgrim has well understood these dangers. He knows that the delight of woods and waterfalls, of stars and storms, may alienate man from his fellow-man. He has guarded himself by some wise temperance. He has From found here his golden mean. thus conversing, he "loves not man the less, but nature more." Is this a young Wordsworth, beginning, in the school of nature, to learn the wisdom of humanity? At all events, here is, for the occasion, the most express and earnest disclaimer of the mood of misanthropy; and we rejoice to hear the Pilgrim speak of interviews "in which I steal From all I may be, or have been before." From all that is, from all the ungracious, the harsh, the unkind, the sore, the embittered, the angry, the miserable! Not, surely, from all the amiable and all the gladsome; and especially not from the whole personality and identity of his character. The picture he had given us of himself was that of a powerful mind, self-set at war with its kind, yet within an exasperated hate ever and anon unfolding undestroyed, sometimes hardly vitiated, some portion of its original ingenerate faculty of love. Here we behold him now as God made him, and no longer possessed by a demon. Change his rhyme into our prose-and you do not dislike our prose-and in sober and sincere sadness the Childe thus speaks -"I steal, under the power of these delicious, renovating, gladdening, hallowing influences, out of myself-out of that evil thing which man had made me rather, alas! which I had made myself into; and if long wandering, disuse of humanity, separation from the scene of my wrongs, and this auspicious dominion of inviolate nature have in these past years already amended me-if I have been worse than I am-even that worse and that worst these interviews' obliterate and extinguish." The soured milk of human kindness is again "And feel What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all con ceal," is indeed powerless writing, and the stanza merited a better close. But the whole stanza protests, proclaims the glad healing power of the natural world over him. He has described this as well as he could, and sums up with saying that by him it is indescribable. "I derive from these communions a rapturous transformation-so great, so wondrous, that my ignorant skill of words is utterly unable to render it; but, at the same time, so self-powerful, that, in despite of this my concealing inability, tones of it will outbreak, make themselves heard, felt, and understood." Thus Byron sets the tune of his Address to the Ocean. The first Four Stanzas, therefore, be their poetry more or less, required, upon this account, enucleation; and further, dear Neophyte, inasmuch as they are particularly humane, they should take their effectual place among evidences which separate him personally from some of his poetical Timons. - the Four Stanzas beautiful,-that is Thy melodies of woods, and winds, and waters, The poem, then, is an Address to the Ocean by a Lover of the Ocean. It seems reasonable, then, to ask, first, what is it natural to expect that such a poem should be? And if it proves to be something remarkably different, then to inquire whether any particular circumstance or condition has intervened which justifies the poet in following an unexpected course. Now, for natural expectation, the theme is one of eulogy; and one may say, therefore, that praise customarily expresses itself in one or other of two principal ways-namely, directly or indirectly. We praise directly, for instance, when, moved by the contemplation of some great or interesting subject, we single forth, one after another, the qualities of its character, or the facts in its history, which have provoked our love, our admiration, our joy, our gratitude. Upon the other hand, we praise indirectly when we extol the subject of our eulogy by dispraising another foreign subject, which we oppose to the chosen one in the way of relief or foil; whether we establish mere comparison of contrast between the two, or cite an opposition of actual enmity between them as if, in hymning Apollo, we should insist upon the horror and fury, the earth-pollution and the earth-affliction, of the monster Python. A moment of reflection satisfies us that both ways are alike naturalboth, with occasion, alike unavoidable; but it is impossible to help equally seeing that these two ways of eulogy differ materially from each other in two respects, the temper of inspiration which dictates, animates, and supports the one or other manner of attributing renown, and the motive justifying the one eulogistic procedure or the other. The temper of direct praise is always wholly genial; that of lauding by illaudation has in it perforce an ungenial element. The motive to direct praise eternally subsists and is there, as long as the subject eulogised subsists and is there. This, then, is the ordinary method. If any thing has just happened that provokes the indirect way-as if Python has just been vanquished-then good and well; or if the poet, by some personal haunting sorrow, or by an unvanquished idiosyncrasy, must arrive at pleasure through pain, so be it but this method is clearly extraordinary and exceptive to the rule; and the reason for using it must be prominent, definite, and flashing in all men's eyes. The other method never can require justifying this does always; and if it fail conspicuously in aught, the very opposite effect to that intended is produced, and the eulogy is no laud. You may say, indeed, and say truly, that all eulogy shall be mixed-that naturally and necessarily every subject has its title to favour by sympathy and by antipathy. Which of the two shall predominate? We need scarcely answer that question. The mood of mind in which the Poet sings must be genial and benign, though he may have to deal in fierce invective. And Read then, dearest Neophyte, the first Four Stanzas-recite them again, for you have them by heart. It is not easy to imagine any thing more completely at variance with all that preamble for the hymn than the hymn itself. The poet, imbued, as we have seen, with the love of nature and of man, will breathe on both his benediction. He will glorify the Sea. how does he attain the transported and affectionate contemplation of the abyss of waters? By the opposition of man's impotence to the might of the sea; by the opposition of the land subjected to man, mixed up in his destinies, and changeable with him, to the ocean free from all change, excepting that of its own moods, the free play of its own gigantic will. For though, philosophically speaking, the immense mass of waters is in itself inert and powerless; lifted into tides by the sun and moon; lifted into storm by raging and invisible winds; yet the poet, lawfully, and by a compulsion which lies alike upon all our minds, apprehends in what is involuntary, self-willed motion, wild changeable moods, a pleasure of rolling sun, moon, and winds, being for the moment left utterly out of thought; and it may be that Byron here does this well. But, what is the worth, what the meaning of the first Four Stanzas-in which you have delighted, because in them the Bard you love had deliberately and passionately rejected all hostile regard of man, and reclaimed for himself his place among the brotherhood-when we see that hostile regard in all its |