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LORD BYRON

1788-1824

GEORGE GORDON NOEL BYRON, the descendant of a noble family dating from the Norman Conquest, was born in London, Jan. 22, 1788. His father was a reckless libertine, his mother a passionate and foolish heiress. Her fortune was soon squandered by her husband, who then left her to bring up their son in poverty. At the age of ten the boy inherited from a grand-uncle the title of Lord Byron and the estate of Newstead Abbey.

At seventeen years of age Byron entered Trinity College, Cambridge. Here he distinguished himself by his fondness for athletics, swimming, riding, fencing, and boxing. He cared little for his studies, though he read very widely. His first volume of poems, Hours of Idleness, was published while he was still an undergraduate. It was harshly criticised by the Edinburgh Review, and Byron answered the attack in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, a poem which first displayed his genius for satire. Shortly afterwards, in 1809, he left England on a long tour through the south and east of Europe. He visited Portugal, Spain, Sardinia, Sicily, and Malta, traveled through the savage highlands of Albania to Athens, and sailed through the Ægean to Constantinople.

In 1811 he returned to England, bringing with him the materials for the first two cantos of Childe Harold, which appeared in the following year. This poem made him famous. During the next few years he wrote a number of romantic poems, the scenes of which are laid in Greece or Turkey. Such are The Giaour, The Corsair, Lara, and The Siege of Corinth. In 1815 he married Miss Milbank, but a year later, shortly after the birth of their daughter, she deserted him. The cause of her action has never been known; she pretended that her life had been in danger from

his violence and hinted that some horrible crime separated them forever. Such an outcry arose that Byron felt obliged to leave England, and early in 1816 he took final leave of his country.

The first years of his voluntary exile were spent in wild dissipation, but he was finally rescued from his licentious life by an attachment for a beautiful Venetian lady, and through her influence enrolled himself among the Italians who were endeavoring to shake off the Austrian yoke.

In 1823 he joined the Greeks in their struggle for independence and looked forward to playing the part of liberator of the country he loved; but he was attacked by fever and died at Missolonghi on the 19th of April, 1824.

Byron's character was a curious mixture of base and noble elements. He was proud, self-willed, and overbearing. At the same time he was generous, brave, and loving. He abandoned himself more than once to degrading passions, but was strong enough to shake them off, and we must not forget that he left a life of ease in Italy to die for the cause of freedom. In his work, as in his character, good and bad are strangely mingled. He wrote hastily and carelessly, and seldom revised his poems, and as a consequence they are full of faults. On the other hand, he is, at his best, one of the strongest, sincerest, and most impressive of English poets.

SONNET ON CHILLON

ETERNAL Spirit of the chainless Mind!
Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! thou art,
For there thy habitation is the heart
The heart which love of thee alone can bind;
And when thy sons to fetters are consigned

To fetters, and the damp vault's dayless gloom,
Their country conquers with their martyrdom,
And Freedom's fame finds wings on every wind.
Chillon thy prison is a holy place,

And thy sad floor an altar - for 't was trod,

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Until his very steps have left a trace

Worn, as if thy cold pavement were a sod,
By Bonnivard! May none those marks efface!
For they appeal from tyranny to God.

THE PRISONER OF CHILLON

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My hair is gray, but not with years,

Nor grew it white

In a single night,

As men's have grown from sudden fears:
My limbs are bowed, though not with toil,

But rusted with a vile repose,

For they have been a dungeon's spoil,
And mine has been the fate of those

To whom the goodly earth and air
Are banned, and barred forbidden fare;
But this was for my father's faith

I suffered chains and courted death;

That father perished at the stake
For tenets he would not forsake;
And for the same his lineal race
In darkness found a dwelling place;
We were seven who now are one,

Six in youth, and one in age,
Finished as they had begun,

Proud of Persecution's rage;

One in fire, and two in field,

Their belief with blood have sealed,

Dying as their father died,

For the God their foes denied;
Three were in a dungeon cast,

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Of whom this wreck is left the last.

II

gray,

There are seven pillars of Gothic mold,
In Chillon's dungeons deep and old,
There are seven columns, massy and
Dim with a dull imprisoned ray,
A sunbeam which hath lost its way,
And through the crevice and the cleft
Of the thick wall is fallen and left;
Creeping o'er the floor so damp,
Like a marsh's meteor lamp:
And in each pillar there is a ring,

And in each ring there is a chain;
That iron is a cankering thing,

For in these limbs its teeth remain,
With marks that will not wear away,
Till I have done with this new day,
Which now is painful to these eyes,
Which have not seen the sun so rise
For years
I lost their long and heavy score,

I cannot count them o'er,

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When my last brother drooped and died,

And I lay living by his side.

III

They chained us each to a column stone,

And we were three-yet, each alone;

We could not move a single pace,

We could not see each other's face,

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But with that pale and livid light
That made us strangers in our sight:
And thus together - yet apart,

Fettered in hand, but joined in heart, 'T was still some solace, in the dearth Of the pure elements of earth,

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To hearken to each other's speech, .
And each turn comforter to each
With some new hope, or legend old,
Or song heroically bold;

But even these at length grew cold.
Our voices took a dreary tone,
An echo of the dungeon stone,

A grating sound, not full and free,
As they of yore were wont to be:
It might be fancy, but to me
They never sounded like our own.

IV

I was the eldest of the three,

And to uphold and cheer the rest I ought to do and did my best And each did well in his degree.

The youngest, whom my father loved, Because our mother's brow was given To him, with eyes as blue as heaven

For him my soul was sorely moved;

And truly might it be distressed
To see such bird in such a nest;
For he was beautiful as day—
(When day was beautiful to me
As to young eagles, being free) —
A polar day, which will not see
A sunset till its summer's gone,

Its sleepless summer of long light,
The snow-clad offspring of the sun :

And thus he was as pure and bright,
And in his natural spirit gay,

With tears for naught but others' ills,
And then they flowed like mountain rills,

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