Finding no place for their landing better,
They ran the boat ashore,—and overset her.
Then comes the episode of Haidee, "a long low island song of ancient days," the character of the girl herself being like a thread of pure gold running through the fabric of its surroundings, motley in every page; e.g., after the impassioned close of the "Isles of Greece," we have the stanza:—
Thus sang, or would, or could, or should, have sung,
The modern Greek, in tolerable verse;
If not like Orpheus quite, when Greece was young,
Yet in those days he might have done much worse—
with which the author dashes away the romance of the song, and then launches into a tirade against Bob Southey's epic and Wordsworth's pedlar poems. This vein exhausted, we come to the "Ave Maria," one of the most musical, and seemingly heartfelt, hymns in the language. The close of the ocean pastoral (in c. iv.) is the last of pathetic narrative in the book; but the same feeling that "mourns o'er the beauty of the Cyclades," often re-emerges in shorter passages. The fifth and sixth cantos, in spite of the glittering sketch of Gulbeyaz, and tho fawn-like image of Dudù, are open to the charge of diffuseness, and the character of Johnson is a failure. From the seventh to the tenth, the poem decidedly dips, partly because the writer had never been in Russia; then it again rises, and shows no sign of falling off to the end.
No part of the work has more suggestive interest or varied power than some of the later cantos, in which Juan is whirled through the vortex of the fashionable life which Byron knew so well, loved so much, and at last esteemed so little. There is no richer piece of descriptive writing in his works than that of Newstead (in c. xiii.); nor is there any analysis of female character so subtle as that of the Lady Adeline. Conjectures as to the originals of imaginary portraits, are generally futile; but Miss Millpond—not Donna Inez—is obviously Lady Byron; in Adeline we may suspect that at Genoa he was drawing from the life in the Villa Paradiso; while Aurora Raby seems to be an idealization of La Guiccioli:—
Early in years, and yet more infantine
In figure, she had something of sublime
In eyes, which sadly shone, as seraphs' shine:
All youth—but with an aspect beyond time;
Radiant and grave—us pitying man's decline;
Mournful—but mournful of another's crime,
She look'd as if she sat by Eden's door,
And grieved for those who could return no more.
She was a Catholic, too, sincere, austere,
As far as her own gentle heart allow'd,
And deem'd that fallen worship far more dear,
Perhaps, because 'twas fallen: her sires were proud
Of deeds and days, when they had fill'd the ear
Of nations, and had never bent or bow'd
To novel power; and, as she was the last,
She held her old faith and old feelings fast.
She gazed upon a world she scarcely knew,
As seeking not to know it; silent, lone,
As grows a flower, thus quietly she grew,
And kept her heart serene within its zone.
Constantly, towards the close of the work, there is an echo of home and country, a half involuntary cry after—
The love of higher things and better days;
Th'unbounded hope, and heavenly ignorance
Of what is call'd the world and the world's ways.