Part 22 (1/2)

Every trough will be boat enough, With a rag for a sail, we can sweep through the sky

Who flies not to-night, when means he to fly?

CHAPTER XL

”The Two Foscari”--”Werner”--”The Deformed Transformed”--”Don Juan”-- ”The Liberal”--Removes from Pisa to Genoa

I have never heard exactly where the tragedy of The Two Foscari ritten: that it was iined in Venice is probable The subject is, perhaps, not very fit for a draic e and affection, and the composition is full of the peculiar stuff of the poet's ownsadness hich Jacopo Foscari looks in the first scene fro his enjoyment of the sea

How many a ti, The wave all roughen'd: with a swi the billows back fro from my lip th' audacious brine Which kiss'd it like a wine-cup

The whole passage, both prelude and re and revelling in the su is no less beautifully given and appropriate to the author's condition, far one forth Froion with their flocks and herds; Had I been cast out like the Jews from Zion, Or like our fathers driven by Attila Froiven sohts; but afterward address'd Myself to those about me, to create A new home and first state

What follows is still more pathetic:

Ay--we but hear Of the survivors' toil in their new lands, Their numbers and success; but who can nu, Or after their departure; of that reen and native fields to view Froh deep with such identity To the poor exile's fever'd eye, that he Can scarcely be restrained fro them?

That melody {291b} which out of tones and tunes Collects such pasti sorrow Of the sad mountaineer, when far away From his snow-canopy of cliffs and clouds, That he feeds on the sweet but poisonous thought And dies--You call this weakness! It is strength, I say--the parent of all honest feeling: He who loves not his country can love nothing

MARINA

Obey her then, 'tis she that puts thee forth

JACOPO FOSCARI

Ay, there it is 'Tis like a mother's curse Upon my soul--the mark is set upon me

The exiles you speak of went forth by nations; Their hands upheld each other by the way; Their tents were pitch'd together--I'm alone-- Ah, you never yet Were far away fro distance, While every furrow of the vessel's track Seeo down upon your native spires So cal a disturbed vision Of them and theirs, awoke and found therets, and awakens syuish which pride concealed, but unable to repress, gave vent to in the is of one that was to him as Hecuba

It was at Pisa that Werner, or The Inheritance, a tragedy, ritten, or at least completed It is taken entirely from the German's tale, Kruitzner, published many years before, by one of the Miss Lees, in their Canterbury Tales So far back as 1815, Byron began a drama upon the same subject, and nearly completed an act when he was interrupted ”I have adopted,” he says hie of ment which exempts it from that kind of criticism to which his principal works are herein subjected

But The Deforh confessedly an iinal work In the opinion of Mr Moore, it probably owes so to the author's painful sensibility to the defect in his own foot; an accident which must, from the acuteness hich he felt it, have essentially contributed to enable him to comprehend and to express the envy of those afflicted with irremediable exceptions to the ordinary course of fortune, or who have been amerced by nature of their fair proportions But save only a part of the first scene, the sketch will not rank a the felicitous works of the poet It was intended to be a satire--probably, at least--but it is only a fragment--a failure

Hitherto I have not noticed Don Juan otherwise than incidentally It was commenced in Venice, and afterward continued at intervals to the end of the sixteenth canto, until the author left Pisa, when it was not resu objections have been made to its moral tendency; but, in the opinion of many, it is the poet's masterpiece, and undoubtedly it displays all the variety of his powers, coree in any other of his works The serious and pathetic portions are exquisitely beautiful; the descriptive have all the distinctness of the best pictures in Childe Harold, and are, enerally drawn from nature, while the satire is for the ly witty The characters are sketched with arotesque, are yet not often overcharged It is professedly an epic poem, but it may be more properly described as a poetical novel Nor can it be said to inculcate any particular moral, or to do more than unhout, it exhibits a free irreverent knowledge of the world, laughing or ht serves, in the most unexpected antitheses to the proprieties of time, place, and circuress of a libertine through life, not an unprincipled prodigal, whose profligacy, groith his growth, and strengthening with his strength, passes froence into the sordid sensuality of systeentleour and vivacity of his animal spirits into a world of adventures, in which his stars are chiefly in fault for his liaisons, settles at last into an honourable lawgiver, a moral speaker on divorce bills, and possibly a subscriber to the Society for the Suppression of Vice

The author has not con, but such appears to have been the drift of it, affording ample opportunities to unveil the foibles and follies of all sorts of enerally supposed to contain much of the author's own experience, but still, with all its riant knowledge of bowers and boudoirs, it is deficient as a true li man as if he were always ruled by one predominant appetite

In the character of Donna Inez and Don Jose, it has been iined that Lord Byron has sketched himself and his lady It ot pretty well over the lachryer doubtful that the twenty-seventh stanza records a biographical fact, and the thirty-sixth his own feelings, when,