save themselves amidst such waves; but "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. He then sat down, folding his arms, very calm; he even joked with the captain, who was putting his dollars into his waistcoat pocket. The ship approached the rocks. All this time Byron was not seen to change countenance. A man thus tried and moulded can paint extreme situations and sentiments. After all, they are never painted otherwise than by experience. The most inventive-Dante and Shakespeare-though quite different, yet do the same thing. However high their genius rose, it always had its feet on observation; and their most foolish, as well as their most splendid pictures, never offer to the world more than an image of their age, or of their own heart. At most, they deduce; that is, having derived from two or three features the inward qualities of the man within themselves and of the men around them, they draw thence, by a sudden ratiocination of which they have no consciousness, the varied skein of actions and sentiments. They may be artists, but they are observers. They may invent, but they describe. Their glory does not consist in the display of a phantasmagoria, but in the discovery of a truth. They are the first to enter some unexplored province of humanity, which becomes their domain, and thenceforth supports their name like an appanage. Byron found his domain, which is that of sad and tender sentiments: it is a heath, and full of ruins; but he is at home there, and he is alone.

What an abode! And it is on this desolation that he dwells. He muses on it. See the brothers of Childe Harold pass-the characters who people it. One in his prison, chained up with his two remaining brothers. Their father and three others had perished fighting, or were burnt for their faith. One by one, before the eyes of the eldest, the last two languish and fade: a silent and slow agony amidst the damp darkness into which a beam of the sickly sun pierces through a crevice. After the death of the first, the survivors "begged as a boon " that he shall at least be buried on a spot "whereon the day might shine." The jailers

"Coldly laugh'd-and laid him there:
The flat and turfless earth above
The being we so much did love;

His empty chain above it leant."

Then the youngest "faded" daily

"With all the while a cheek whose bloom

Was as a mockery of the tomb,

Whose tints as gently sunk away

As a departing rainbow's ray." 5

But the pillars to which they are chained are too far apart-the elder cannot approach his dying younger brother; he listens and hears the failing sighs; he cries for succor, and none comes. He bursts his chain with one strong bound: all is over. He takes that cold hand, and then, before the motionless body, his senses are lost, his thoughts arrested; he is like a drowning man, who, after passing through pangs of agony, lets himself sink down like a stone, and no longer feels existence but by a complete petrifaction of horror. Here is another brother of Childe Harold, Mazeppa, bound naked on a wild horse, rushing over the steppes. He writhes, and his swollen limbs, cut by the cords, are bleeding. A whole day the course continues, and behind him the wolves are howling. The night through he hears their long monotonous chase, and at the end his energy fails.

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 spun like a mighty wheel;

I saw the trees like drunkards reel,
And a slight flash sprang o'er my eyes,
Which saw no further: 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." 6

Byron's Works, x., "The Prisoner of Chillon," c. vii. 234.

Byron's Works, x., "The Prisoner of Chillon," c. viii. 236. Ibid. xi.,

Mazeppa," c. xiii. 167.

THE CASTLE OF CHILLON.

Photogravure from an etching by Léon Gautier.

The scene which this picture represents 's one that has been rendered famous by Byron's celebrated poem, “The Prisoner of Chillon," Apart from the romantic interest that is attached to the castle, the sense of the artistic is gratified by a certan gloomy charm which seems to pervade the scene, in keeping with the historie memories of the old prison. Tourists from all parts of the world may be counted among the visitors to this place of interest, and the word Chillon is indissolubly connected with the name of the poet who immortalized the tate of the in the poem which, has been fitly described as the epitome of tragedy.

Prisoner"