The inclusion of "life" among star similes may have been suggested by the astrological terms, "house of life" and "lord of the ascendant." Wordsworth, in his Ode (Intimations of Immortality, etc.) speaks of the soul as "our life's star." Mr. Tozer, who supplies most of these "comparisons," adds a line from Shelley's Adonais, 55. 8 (Pisa, 1821)—
"The soul of Adonais, like a star.">[
[332] [{271}] [Compare Wordsworth's sonnet, "It is a Beauteous," etc.—
"It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a nun
Breathless with adoration.">[
[333] [Here, too, the note is Wordsworthian, though Byron represents as inherent in Nature, that "sense of something far more deeply interfused," which Wordsworth (in his Lines on Tintern Abbey) assigns to his own consciousness.]
[kc] [{272}] It is a voiceless feeling chiefly felt.—[MS.]
[kd] Of a most inward music——.—[MS.]
[334] [As the cestus of Venus endowed the wearer with magical attraction, so the immanence of the Infinite and the Eternal in "all that formal is and fugitive," binds it with beauty and produces a supernatural charm which even Death cannot resist.]
[335] [Compare Herodotus, i. 131, Οἱ δὲ νομίζουσι Διἰ μὲν, ἐπὶ τὰ ὑψηλότατα τῶν οὐρέων ἀναβαίνοντες θυσίας ἕρδειν τὸν κύκλον πάντα τοῦ ὐρανο Δία καλέοντες. Perhaps, however, "early Persian" was suggested by a passage in "that drowsy, frowsy poem, The Excursion"—
"The Persian—zealous to reject
Altar and image and the inclusive walls
And roofs and temples built by human hands—
To loftiest heights ascending, from their tops
With myrtle-wreathed tiara on his brow,
Presented sacrifice to moon and stars."