Tinge thy celestial aspects, and make tame The beauties of the sun-bow which bends o'er thee. Wherein is glass'd serenity of soul," &c. &c. But what struck Goëthe in this fine poem, and what entitles it more, perhaps, than its other merits, to the rank which we assign to it among the productions of its author, is the conception of Manfred's character and situation. To judge from our own experience, nothing can be more profoundly interesting. Often as we have read it, it has lost none of its effect. We never take it up but with some such feeling as we conceive to have possessed of old the pilgrims of Delphi and Dodona, or those anxious mortals, who, like Count Manfred himself, have sought to learn the secrets of their own destiny, by dealing with evil spirits. The book contains a spell for us, and we lay our hands upon it with awe. It brings us into actual contact with the beings that wait upon the hero's bidding. We are transported, by an ideal presence, to that Alpine solitude in which this second Cain-this child of an accursed destiny-is alternately agitated by the furies of remorse, or "wrapt as with a shroud" in the darkness and desolation of a sullen despair. 'Daughter of air! I tell thee since that hour- But peopled with the furies;-I have gnash'd I have affronted death-but in the war And fatal things pass'd harmless-the cold hand The affluence of my soul--which one day was I sought in all, save where 'tis to be found." It would be worth while to compare Manfred in detail with the Orestes of the Greek tragedy. We regret that it is not in our power to do so at present; but we should be glad if some one, who has more leisure to trace the contrasts and coincidences of literature, would take our hint. We will venture a few remarks of our own, having a bearing upon a topic already discussed. Manfred, like the Eumenides of Eschylus, is a picture of remorse, but there can be no better illustration of the difference which we admit to exist between ancient and modern dramatic literature, than is afforded by the manner in which this affection is exhibited, respectively, in the Greek tragedy and the English drama. In the former it is made a sensible object-it is personified-its office is performed by the Furies. They have pursued the wretched parricide with wild rage, until he takes refuge in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Here the tragedy opens. The fugitive stained with the blood of his guilty mother, is seen supplicating the protection of the god. The vindictive goddesses, attired in their robes of black, and with serpents entwined in their horrid tresses, are sleeping around him-having apparently sunk under the effort of their long and unremitted pursuit. When the young man, has by the contrivance of Apollo, stolen out of the Temple, to make his way to Athens, where Minerva is to decide finally upon his innocence or guilt, the shade of Clytemnestra gashed with the fatal wounds, appears, and calling aloud to the Furies in reproachful language, vanishes again. The Furies, aroused by her voice, discover that Orestes has made his escape. Their rage is greatly excited-they dance about the stage in frantic disorder-they renew the pursuit with fresh keenness, and are next seen at Athens, near the overtaken fugitive, who has embraced the statue of Minerva. They claim his head as justly forfeited to the laws-the goddess listens to both parties, and agrees to become their umpire-the cause is regularly discussed, and the unfortunate young man is at last acquitted by an equality of suffrages. *This is worthy of further observation. The spirit of Manfred is strictly modern or romantic The air of abstract reflection, the moral musing, the pensive wo, which pervade it, are a contrast to the sensible imagery and the lively personifica tions of the Greek play. Yet its frame and structure, are strictly 'classical.' Byron, in all his dramatic compositions, professed to copy after the Greek models, -as much so as Milton in the Samson Agonistes. But besides discarding the chorus, he has not in other respects approached those models so closely as Milton. From what he has done, however, and from the character of his genius, we think, as we remarked in a former number, that had he been born an Athenian, be would have excelled peculiarly in that walk. Manfred proves it-and here we will add, that his aerial chorus of sprites and fiends, is quite equal in that kind, to any thing in the grandest conceptions of Eschylns, and nothing can be more felicitous, in the way of choral ode, than some of their hymns-witness, especially, the grand anthem in honor of Arimanes. It is evident that the moral lesson conveyed by such an exhibition as this, is rather the secondary, than the principal object; nor will those who are versed in the dramatic history of the Greeks, be at all at a loss to account for the apparent dimness of the allegory in which the truth is veiled. Yet to one who looks attentively into the hidden sense, the picture of remorse thus presented, as it were, by types and sensible images, is equally remarkable for scenic effect and profound philosophical analysis. But Byron in Manfred derives no help from such external symbols-nor does he darkly shadow his purpose in allegory. It is spread out over the whole surface. His hero is alone. He flies from the commerce of his own species, and communes only with those aerial shapes, whose office it is to "tend on mortal thoughts"-to do the behests, to consult the wishes, to echo the voice of their master-in short, to be his slave and his shadow, so long as they are under his spells. This, indeed, is the purpose, and a very important one, which the spirits of the drama answer. Manfred, really tells his own story-his attendants are no better than the chorus of a Greek tragedy-good listeners. He might have done substantially what he has done in a long monologue; or he might have addressed himself in a voice of lamentation, to the mountains and the desert caves. But a perpetual soliloquy of three acts would have been equally tiresome and irregular, and yet, to have introduced such a being into a common drama-to have represented him as moving in the dull round of life, and interchanging sentiments with vulgar interlocutors, would not have been in keeping with the unearthly grandeur of his character, and would have defeated what we take to have been the great purpose of the poet. Like Faustus, therefore, Manfred, by his aspiring genius, must compass such a knowledge of the visible world, as shall enable him to control the invisible—that he may summon a disembodied auditory from the depths of the sea, or the remotest star in the firmament, and proclaim his remediless woes and his irreversible doom, by this same preternatural agency, to the most distant parts of the universe, and all orders of created being. The machinery of the poem then answers two great purposes it relieves its monotony, without violating its plan, and it exalts the dignity of the hero without disturbing the characteristic solitude-the essential loneliness of his being. This needs a few more words of explanation. We have said that this drama is a picture of remorse; and so it is, but of a peculiar kind of remorse. It is not self-condemnation for a mere crime or sin committed. Manfred's conscience was made of sterner stuff than that. Above all, it was not, as * a late writer supposes, because his sister Astarte, had fallen a sacrifice to some diabolical piece of magic, in which she was at once an accomplice and a victim. Byron was not a man to make a book of sentimental raving á la Kotzebue, upon such a fantastical and ludicrous subject. He aimed at exhibiting what may be called his ruling idea, in the strongest of all possible forms. That idea is that without a deep and engrossing passion, without love, in short, intense, devoted love; no power, nor influence in the world, nor genius, nor knowledge, nor Epicurean bliss, can "bestead or fill the fixed mind with all their toys ;" and that a man may be completely miserable for want of such a passion, though blessed, to all appearances, with whatever can make life desirable. This idea is, in reference to very excitable natures, certainly just-and is thus expressed in the soliloquy with which that drama opens. "I have no dread, And feel the curse to have no natural fear Nor fluttering throb, that beats with hopes or wishes, Here is evidently "the leafless desert of the soul," "the vacant bosom's wilderness," the dreary vacuity, the mortal apathy upon which so many changes are rung in all his other poems. But this is not all; for if it were, Manfred would be no better than the Giaour. The merit that raises him to his bad eminence, among these heroes of "disappointed passion," is twofold-in the first place, it is darkly hinted that his love was unnatural or, at least, unlawful, and so dishonorable to her whom he adored; and, secondly, that he was either the wilful or involuntary instrument of her destruction-her blood was upon his hands, and her curse upon his soul. "And a magic voice and verse From thy false tears I did distil An essence which hath strength to kill; * Galt.-We happened to look for the first time into his work a few hours ago, and have been quite shocked at a coincidence or two in the previous pages, which were in type before we saw his book. From thy own heart I then did wring By thy cold breast and serpent smile, Which passed for human, thine own heart; I call upon thee! and compel Whatever had been the conduct alluded to in these terrible lines, he clearly regards himself as the murderer of Astarte. He had murdered-by what means, is not material 66 her whom of all earthly things That lived the only thing he seemed to love." The only tie of existence had been severed-the single feeling that made the world bearable, and without which it was no better than a vast Bastile, had been extinguished-the being that loved him with the devotedness of woman's love, while all mankind besides, were cold or hostile to him, and who was to him, amidst the weariness of life or its severest wo, real or imaginary, an interest, a passion and an unfailing resource and a sweet consolation, had been destroyed-and by him. This catastrophe was, it is evident, a moral suicide, and he became afterwards, as he expresses it, "his soul's sepulchre." His hope, his love, his dream of bliss, made more ravishing by the contrasted gloom of his ordinary life, was gone-he is condemned to that dreariest of all solitudes, the utter loneliness of the blighted heart-he now, at last, perceives all the guilt of the coldness, or perversness, or cruelty, or whatever else it was, that led to the event which he has such bitter cause to lament-the worth, the loveliness of his victim is felt in the sufferings which the loss of her has inflicted-and he repents what he has done and curses the destiny which ordered or permitted it, and addicts himself more exclusively than ever, to the society of evil spirits, and devotes himself to the tortures of hell as a relief from the |