A grave! the sun his light! and Heaven her God!”
Cain.
It was quite suitable for Byron to talk so in his Cain, but he has not unsettled the position of the world’s estimate of its first mother, so firmly established by Milton. He was, at the time, perhaps, thinking of himself as Cain, and of his own mother as in one of her imprecating paroxysms. Alas, that he should have gone on in lawless indulgence, insulting, both in poetry and practice, the sanctity of domestic, heaven-constituted, earth-blessing ties, until, after an abortive, ill-directed struggle for poor Greece, he sunk into an early grave, at 36 aet., the very meridian of life! He was never satisfied with his earthly lot, not even with the rare gifts of his genius, nor with the achievements it made. He professed to consider a poet, no matter what his eminence, as quite a secondary character to a great statesman or warrior. As he had failed in the first character, he resolved to try the second, and strike for the liberty he had sung. But Fame had no place for him in this part of her temple. With the rest of the tuneful tribe, he descends to the judgment of posterity as a Poet; with all men of genius above the million, as more deeply responsible than they to the author of all mercies; with all men whatever, as a MORAL AND IMMORTAL BEING, accountable at the tribunal of God.
The mind would fail in any attempt to estimate the immense influence of his genius and writings upon the youthful mind and morals of the past generation—an influence to be augmented in a geometrical ratio in the future. What is written, is written, constituting a portion of the active influence circulating in the world—not to be recalled, not to be extinguished, but to move on to the end of time, and finally to be met by its originator, where all illusions will vanish, and all truth, justice and purity be vindicated.
OUTWARD BOUND.
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BY THOMAS BUCHANAN READ.
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Fare ye well, our native valleys,