279:

Whate'er exists hath properties that spread
Beyond itself, communicating good,
A simple blessing or with evil mixed.—
Spirit that knows no insulated spot,
No chasm, no solitude; from link to link
It circulates, the soul of all the worlds.

280:

Where Knowledge, ill begun in cold remarks
On outward things, with formal inference ends,
Or if the mind turn inward, 't is perplexed,
Lost in a gloom of uninspired research....
.... Viewing all objects unremittingly
In disconnexion, dead and spiritless,
And still dividing and dividing still,
Break down all grandeur.

281:

The sun is fixed,
And the infinite magnificence of heaven
Fixed within reach of every human eye.
The sleepless Ocean murmurs for all ears,
The vernal field infuses fresh delight
Into all hearts....
The primal duties shine aloft like stars,
The charities that soothe and heal and bless
Are scattered at the feet of man—like flowers.

282:

Life, I repeat, is energy of Love
Divine or human, exercised in pain,
In strife, in tribulation, and ordained,
If so approved and sanctified, to pass,
Through shades and silent rest, to endless joy.

283: Voir aussi les romans agressifs et socialistes de W. Godwin, surtout Caleb Williams.

284: Il gagna une fois une ophthalmie à visiter des chaumières malsaines.

285: Fag.

286: Queen Mab et notes. À Oxford il avait publié une brochure «sur la nécessité de l'athéisme.»

287: Quelque temps avant sa mort, à vingt-neuf ans, il disait: «Si je mourais maintenant, j'aurais vécu autant que mon père.»

288: Tome IV, page 53, notes de mistress Shelley.—Voyez un excellent article sur Shelley dans la National Review, octobre 1856.

289: Voyez surtout the Witch of Atlas, the Cloud, the Skylark, la fin de l'Islam, Alastor et tout Prométhée.

290:

The sanguine sunrise with his meteor eyes
And his burning plumes outspread,
Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,
When the morning star shines dead....
The orbed maiden with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the moon,
Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor,
By the midnight breezes strewn.

291:

292: Wordsworth, the Excursion, page 328.

Our life is turned
Out of her course, whenever man is made
An offering, a sacrifice, a tool,
Or implement, a passive thing employed
As a brute mean.

293: My school-friendships were with me passions (for I was always violent). I never hear the word Clare (Lord Clare) without the beating of the heart, even now.

294: «Because, if you please,» said Byron holding out his arm, «I would take half.»

295: Moore, t. I, p. 121, année 1807.

296: How very odd that I should have been so utterly, devotedly fond of that girl, at an age when I could neither feel passion, nor know the meaning of the word!... I remember all our caresses,... my restlessness, my sleeplessness. My misery, my love for the girl were so violent, that I sometimes doubt, if I have ever been really attached since.

297: My passion had its usual effects upon me. I could not sleep; I could not eat. I could not rest, and although I had reason to know that she loved me, it was the texture of my life to think of the time which must elapse before we could meet again, being usually about twelve hours of separation. But I was a fool then, and am not much wiser now.

298: Probablement de la gomme de lentisque.

299: I have hardly had a wink of sleep this week past. I have had some curious masking adventures, this carnival.... I will work the mine of my youth to the last vein of the ore, and then.... good night. I have lived and am content.

300: Lockhart, Life of Sir W. Scott, II, 238.

301: If I was born, as the nurses say, with a silver spoon in my mouth, it has stuck in my throat, and spoiled my palate, so that nothing put into it is swallowed with much relish, unless it be Cayenne... I see no such horror in a dreamless sleep, and I have no conception of any existence which duration would not make tiresome.

302: I like Junius, he was a good hater....

I don't understand yielding sensitiveness. What I feel is an immense rage for 48 hours.

303: Présent.

304: «Never mind, M. Roger, you shall not see any signs of it in me.»

305: I like energy,—even animal energy,—of all kinds—and have need of both, mental and corporal.

306: Il l'appelait «son héros de roman.»

307: English Bards and Scottish Reviewers.

308: Childe Harold is, I think, a very clever poem, but gives no good symptom of the writer's heart or morals. Vice ought to be a little more modest, and it must require impudence almost equal to the noble lord's other powers, to claim sympathy gravely for the ennui arising from his being tired of his wassailers and his paramours. There is a monstrous deal of conceit in it too, for it is informing the inferior part of the world, that their little old-fashioned scruples of limitation are not worthy of his regard....

My noble friend is something like my old peacock, who chooses to bivouac apart from his lady, and sits below my bed-room window, to keep me awake with his screeching lamentation. Only I own he is not equal in melody to lord Byron.

309: Il y a ici une citation de Macbeth que je traduis par un équivalent.

310: I have simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all existing governments.

311: 1821.

312: They mean to insurrect here and are to honour me with a call thereupon. I shall not fall back, though I don't think them in force and heart sufficient to make much of it. But onward. What signifies self?... It is not one man nor a million, but the spirit of liberty that must be spread.... The mere selfish calculation ought never to be made on such occasions and, at present, it shall not be computed by me.... I should almost regret that my own affairs went well, when those of nations are in peril.

313: I always wake in actual despair, and despondency, in all respects, even of that which pleased me over night.

In England, five years ago, I had the same kind of hypochondria, but accompanied with so violent a thirst, that I have drunk as many as fifteen bottles of soda-water in one night, after going to bed, and been still thirsty.... striking off the necks of the bottles from mere thirsty impatience.

What I feel most growing upon me are laziness, and a disrelish more powerful than indifference. If I rouse, it is into fury. I presume that I shall end (if not earlier by accident) like Swift «dying at the top.»

Lega came in with a letter about a bill unpaid at Venice which I thought paid months ago. I flew into a paroxysm of rage, which almost made me faint.

I have always had «une âme» which not only tormented itself, but every body else in contact with it, and an «esprit violent,» which has almost left me without any «esprit» at all.

314: I have written from the fulness of my mind, from passion, from impulse, from many motives, but not «for their sweet voices.»

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all—and publishing also the continuance of the same object, by the action it affords to the mind, which else recoils upon itself.

315: I told you before that I can never recast any thing. I am like the tiger. If I miss the first spring, I go grumbling to my jungle again. But if I do it, it is crushing.

316: I could not write upon any thing without some personal experience and foundation.

317: I am a great reader and admirer of those books (the Bible) and had read them through and through before I was eight years old.—That is to say the Old Testament, for the New struck me as a task, but the other as a pleasure.

318: As to Pope, I have always regarded him as the greatest man in our poetry. Depend upon it. The rest are barbarians. He is a Greek temple, with a gothic cathedral on one hand and a turkish mosque, and all sorts of fantastic pagodas and conventicles about him. You may call Shakspeare and Milton pyramids, but I prefer the temple of Theseus or the Parthenon to a mountain of burnt brick-work.... The grand distinction of the under forms of the new school of poets is their vulgarity. By this I do not mean they are coarse, but shabby genteel.

319: All the styles of the day are bombastic. I don't except my own, no one has done more through negligence to corrupt the language.

320: Voyez le pamphlet qu'il fit contre les lakistes.

321: On vendit du Corsaire 13000 exemplaires en un jour.

322:

And now Childe Harold was sore sick at heart,
And from his fellow bacchanals would flee;
'Tis said, at times the sullen tear would start,
But pride congeal'd the drop within his ee:
Apart he stalk'd in joyless reverie,
And from his native land resolved to go,
And visit scorching climes beyond the sea;
With pleasure drugg'd he almost long'd for woe.

323:

The tender azure of the unruffled deep,
The mountain moss by scorching skies imbrown'd....
The orange tints that gild the greenest bough....

324:

325:

326: Talavera.

327:

328:

329: Par exemple:

As weeping Beauty's cheek at Sorrow's tale.

330: Voici des vers dignes de Pope, très-beaux et très-faux:

And havoc loathes so much the waste of time,
She scarce had left an uncommitted crime.
One hour beheld him since the tide he stemm'd,
Disguised, discover'd, conquering, ta'en, condemn'd,
A chief on land, an outlaw on the deep,
Destroying, saving, prison'd, and asleep!

331:

Who thundering comes on blackest steed,
With slacken'd bit and hoof of speed?
.... Approach, thou craven crouching slave:
Say, is not this Thermopylæ?

332: Moore's Life of lord Byron, III, 438; 1820.

333: I am living here exposed to it (assassination) daily, for I have happened to make a powerful and unprincipled man my enemy, and I never sleep the worse for it, or ride in less solitary places, because precaution is useless and one thinks of it as of a disease which may or may not strike.

334: Galt's Life of lord Byron, 113.

335: «Well, we are all born to die—I shall go with regret, but certainly not with fear.—It is every man's duty to endeavour to preserve the life God has given him; so I advise you all to strip: swimming, indeed, can be of little use in these billows—but as children, when tired with crying, sink placidly to repose—we, when exhausted with struggling, shall die the easier....»

336: «Qu'aurais-je connu et écrit si j'avais été un paisible politique mercantile ou un lord d'antichambre? Un homme doit voyager et se jeter dans le tourbillon, sinon ce n'est pas vivre.» Moore, III, 429.

337:

They coldly laughed,—and laid him there:
The flat and turfless earth above
The being we so much did love;
His empty chain above it leant....
.... He faded............
.......... with all the while a cheek whose bloom
Was as mockery of the tomb,
Whose tints as gently sunk away
As a departing rainbow's ray.....

338:

.... The Earth gave way, the skies roll'd round,
I seem'd to sink upon the ground;
But err'd, for I was fastly bound,
My heart turn'd sick, my brain grew sore,
And throbb'd awhile, then beat no more:
The skies span like a mighty wheel;
I saw the trees like drunkards reel,
And a slight flash sprang o'er my eyes,
Which saw no farther: he who dies
Can die no more than then I died.
.... I felt the blackness come and go
And strove to wake; but could not make
My senses climb up from below:
I felt as on a plank at sea,
When all the waves that dash o'er thee,
At the same time upheave and whelm,
And hurl thee towards a desert realm.

339:

'Tis midnight: on the mountains brown
The cold, round moon shines deeply down;
Blue roll the waters, blue the sky
Spreads like an Ocean hung on high,
Bespangled with those isles of light...
....................................
The waves on either shore lay there
Calm, clear, and azure as the air;
And scarce their foam the pebbles shook,
But murmur'd meekly as the brook.
The winds were pillow'd on the waves;
The banners droop'd along their staves,
And that deep silence was unbroke,
Save where the watch his signal spoke,
Save where the steed neigh'd oft and shrill,
And the wide hum of that wild host
Rustled like leaves from coast to coast....

340:

.... And he saw the lean dogs beneath the wall
Hold o'er the dead their carnival,
Gorging and growling o'er carcass and limb;
They were too busy to bark at him.
From a Tartar's skull they had stripp'd the flesh,
As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh;
And their white tusks crunch'd o'er the whiter skull,
As it slipp'd through their jaws when their edge grew dull,
As they lazily mumbled the bones of the dead,
When they scarce could rise from the spot where they fed;
So well had they broken a lingering fast
With those who had fallen for that night's repast.
And Alp knew, by the turbans that roll'd on the sand,
The foremost of these were the best of his band:
Crimson and green were the shawls of their wear,
And each scalp had a single long tuft of hair,
All the rest was shaven and bare.
The scalps were in the wild dog's maw,
The hair was tangled round his jaw.
But close by the shore, on the edge of the gulf,
There sat a vulture flapping a wolf,
Who had stolen from the hills, but kept away,
Scared by the dogs, from the human prey;
But he seized on his share of a steed that lay,
Pick'd by the birds, on the sands of the bay.

341:

He scarce can speak, but motions him 't is vain,
He clasps the hand that pang which would assuage.
And sadly smiles his thanks to that dark page.
.... His dying tones are in that other tongue,
To which some strange remembrance wildly clung....
.... And once, as Kaled's answering accents ceased,
Rose Lara's hand, and pointed to the East:
Whether (as then the breaking sun from high
Roll'd back the clouds), the morrow caught his eye,
Or that it was chance, or some remember'd scene,
That raised his arm to point where such had been,
Scarce Kaled seem'd to know, but turn'd away,
As if his heart abhorr'd that coming day,
And shrunk his glance before that morning light,
To look on Lara's brow,—where all grew night.
.... But from his visage little could we guess,
So unrepentant, dark, and passionless....
.... But gasping heaved the breath that Lara drew,
And dull the film along his dim eye grew;
His limbs stretch'd fluttering, and his head droop'd o'er.

342:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day.
.............................
Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour
They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks
Extinguish'd with a crash—and all was black.
............................
And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings—the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed,
And men were gathered round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other's face;
.... The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and look'd up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and thence again
With curses cast them down upon the dust
And gnash'd their teeth and howl'd: the wild birds shriek'd,
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl'd
And twined themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food:
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again; a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart,
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought—and that was death,
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails—men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devour'd,
Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corpse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay,
Till hunger clung them; or the dropping dead
Lured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food.
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answer'd not with a caress—he died.
The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar place
Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they raked up
And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands.
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other aspects—saw, and shriek'd, and died—
Even of their mutual hideousness they died....

343: L'ange des saintes amours, l'ange de l'Océan, les chœurs des esprits bienheureux. Voyez cela tout au long dans les Martyrs.

344: Magna peccatrix, S. Lucæ VII, 36.—Mulier Samaritana, S. Johannis IV.—Maria Ægyptiaca (Acta Sanctorum), etc.

345:

Wer ruft das Einzelne zur allgemeinen Weihe,
Wo es in herrlichen Accorden schlägt?

346:

From my youth upwards
My spirit walk'd not with the souls of men,
Nor look'd upon the earth with human eyes;
The thirst of their ambition was not mine;
The aim of their existence was not mine;
My joys, my griefs, my passions, and my powers,
Made me a stranger; though I wore the form,
I had not sympathy with breathing flesh....
.......................
I could not tame my nature down; for he
Must serve who fain would sway—and soothe—and sue—
And watch all time—and pry into all place—
And be a living lie—who would become
A mighty thing upon the mean, and such
The mass are; I disdain'd to mingle with
A herd, though to be leader—and of wolves....

347:

.... My joy was in the wilderness, to breathe
The difficult air of the iced mountain's top,
Where the birds dare not build, nor insect's wing
Flit o'er the herbless granite; or to plunge
Into the torrent, and to roll along
On the swift whirl of the new breaking wave....
.... To follow through the night the moving moon,
The stars and their development; or catch
The dazzling lightnings till eyes grew dim;
Or to look, list'ning, on the scatter'd leaves,
While Autumn winds were at their evening song,
These were my pastimes, and to be alone;
For if the beings, of whom I was one,
Hating to be so,—cross'd me in my path,
I felt myself degraded back to them,
And was all clay again....

348:

.... My solitude is solitude no more,
But peopled with the Furies:—I have gnash'd
My teeth in darkness till returning morn,
Then cursed myself till sunset; I have pray'd
For madness as a blessing—'tis denied me.
I have affronted death—but in the war
Of elements the waters shrunk from me,
And fatal things pass'd harmless—the cold hand
Of an all-pitiless demon held me back,
Back by a single hair, which would not break.
In fantasy, imagination, all
The affluence of my soul—I plunged deep
But like an ebbing wave, it dash'd me back
Into the gulf of my unfathom'd thought
.... I dwell in my despair
And live, and live for ever.

349:

There's bloom upon her cheek;
But now I see it is not living hue,
But a strange hectic—like the unnatural red
Which Autumn plants upon the perish'd leaf.

350:

.... Hear me, hear me—
Astarte! my beloved! speak to me:
I have so much endured—so much endure—
Look on me! the grave hath not changed thee more
Than I am changed for thee. Thou lovedst me
Too much, as I loved thee: we were not made
To torture thus each other, though it were
The deadliest sin to love as we have loved.
Say that thou loath'st me not, that I do bear
This punishment for both—that thou wilt be
One of the blessed—and that I shall die.
For hitherto all hateful things conspire
To bind me in existence—in a life
Which makes me shrink from immortality—
A future like the past. I cannot rest.
I know not what I ask, nor what I seek:
I feel but what thou art, and what I am;
And I would hear yet once before I perish
The voice which was my music—Speak to me!
For I have call'd on thee in the still night,
Startled the slumbering birds from the hush'd boughs
And woke the mountain wolves, and made the caves
Acquainted with thy vainly echoed name,
Which answer'd me—many things answer'd me—
Spirits and men—but thou wert silent all.
.... Speak to me! I have wander'd o'er the earth,
And never found thy likeness—speak to me!
Look on the fiends around, they feel for me:
I fear them not, and feel for thee alone—
Speak to me! though it be in wrath; but say—
I reck not what—but let me hear thee once—
This once—once more!

351:

.... Yet see, he mastereth himself, and makes
His torture tributary to his will.
Had he been one of us, he would have made
An awful spirit.

352:

.... Thou hast no power upon me, that I feel;
Thou never shalt possess me, that I know:
What I have done is done; I bear within
A torture which could nothing gain from thine:
The mind which is immortal makes itself
Requital for its good or evil thoughts—
Is its own origin of ill and end—
And its own place and time;—its innate sense,
When stripp'd of this mortality, derives
No colour from the fleeting things without;
But is absorb'd in sufferance or in joy,
Born from the knowledge of its own desert.
Thou didst not tempt me, and thou couldst not tempt me.
I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey—
But was my own destroyer, and will be
My own hereafter.—Back, ye baffled fiends!
The hand of death is on me—but not yours!

353: Don Juan.

There stands the noble hostess, nor shall sink
With the three thousandth curtsy;
.... Saloon, room, hall, o'erflow beyond their brink,
And long the latest of arrivals halts,
'Midst royal dukes and dames condemn'd to climb,
And gain an inch of staircase at a time....

354: It was as if the house had been divided between your public and understood courtesans. But the intriguantes much outnumbered the regular mercenaries. Now where lay the difference between Pauline and her mamma, and Lady.... and daughter? Except that the two last may enter Carleton and any other house and the two first are limited to the Opera and b—house. How I delight in observing life as it really is—and myself after all the worst of any!

355: Alfred de Musset.

356: Voyez son terrible poëme bouffon The Vision of Judgment contre Southey, George IV, et la parade officielle.

357: Don Juan is a satire on the abuses in the present state of society, and not an eulogy of vice.

358: Stendhal, Mémoires sur lord Byron.

359: Moore's Life of lord Byron, III, 113.

360:

.... I like to see the sun set, sure he'll rise to-morrow,
Not through a misty morning twinkling weak as
A drunken man's dead eye in maudlin sorrow,
But with all heaven t' himself; that day will break as
Beauteous as cloudless, nor be forced to borrow
That sort of farthing candlelight which glimmers
Where reeking London's smoky caldron simmers.

361:

.... I love the language, that soft bastard latin,
Which melts like kisses from a female mouth,
Which sounds as if it should be writ on satin,
With syllables which breathe of the sweet south,
And gentle liquids gliding all so pat in,
That not a single accent seems uncouth,
Like our harsh northern whistling, grunting guttural,
Which we're obliged to hiss, and spit, and sputter all.

362:

I like the women too (forgive my folly),
From the rich peasant cheek of ruddy bronze,
And large black eyes that flash on you a volley
Of rays that say a thousand things at once,
To the high dama's brow, more melancholy
But clear, and with a wild and liquid glance,
Heart on her lips, and soul within her eyes,
Soft as her clime, and sunny as her skies.

363: Voyez Stendhal, Vie de Giacomo Rossini, et Stanley, Vie de Thomas Arnold. Le contraste est complet. Voyez aussi dans Corinne cette opposition très-bien saisie.

364: Journal, février 1821.

365:

She with her flush'd cheek laid on her white arm,
And raven ringlets gather'd in dark crowd
Above her brow, lay dreaming soft and warm;
.... One with her auburn tresses slightly bound,
And fair brows gently drooping, as the fruit
Nods from the tree, was slumbering with soft breath,
And lips apart, which show'd the pearls beneath.
.... A fourth as marble, statue-like and still,
Lay in a breathless, hush'd, and stony sleep;
White, cold and pure........................
.................. a carved lady on a monument.

366:

.... It was like the fawn which, in the lake display'd,
Beholds her own shy, shadowy image pass,
When first she starts, and then returns to peep,
Admiring this new native of the deep.

367: