The Works of Lord Byron Volume III Part 1

The Works Of Lord Byron.

Vol. 3.

by Lord Byron.

NOTES

This etext contains characters from the Latin-1 set plus the following symbols from Unicode: the Greek alphabet and the letters a, i, and c (a and i with macron, c with accent). The work contains phrases in Greek; these are given as the Greek letters followed by a bracketed transliteration in Beta-code, for example ?s?t?? [miseton].

An important feature of this edition is its copious footnotes. Footnotes indexed with letters (e.g. [c], [bf]) show variant forms of Byron's text from ma.n.u.scripts and other sources. Footnotes indexed with arabic numbers (e.g. [17], [221]) are informational. Text in notes and elsewhere in square brackets is the work of Editor E. H. Coleridge. Note text not in brackets is by Byron himself.

In the original, footnotes are printed at the foot of the page on which they are referenced, and their indices start over on each page. In this etext, footnotes have been collected at the end of each section, and have been numbered consecutively throughout the book. Within each block of footnotes are numbers in braces, e.g. {321}. These represent the page number on which the following notes originally appeared. To find a note that was originally printed on page 27, search for {27}.

In note [ci] to _The Giaour_ and in the section headed "NOTE TO _THE BRIDE OF ABYDOS_" the editor showed deleted text struck through with lines. The struck-through words are noted here with braces and dashes, as in {-deleted words-}.

PREFACE TO THE THIRD VOLUME.

The present volume contains the six metrical tales which were composed within the years 1812 and 1815, the _Hebrew Melodies_, and the minor poems of 1809-1816. With the exception of the first fifteen poems (1809-1811)--_Chansons de Voyage_, as they might be called--the volume as a whole was produced on English soil. Beginning with the _Giaour_; which followed in the wake of _Childe Harold_ and shared its triumph, and ending with the ill-omened _Domestic Pieces_, or _Poems of the Separation_, the poems which Byron wrote in his own country synchronize with his popularity as a poet by the acclaim and suffrages of his own countrymen. His greatest work, by which his lasting fame has been established, and by which his relative merits as a great poet will be judged in the future, was yet to come; but the work which made his name, which is stamped with his sign-manual, and which has come to be regarded as distinctively and characteristically Byronic, preceded maturity and achievement.

No poet of his own or other times, not Walter Scott, not Tennyson, not Mr. Kipling, was ever in his own lifetime so widely, so amazingly popular. Thousands of copies of the "Tales"--of the _Bride of Abydos_, of the _Corsair_, of _Lara_--were sold in a day, and edition followed edition month in and month out. Everywhere men talked about the "n.o.ble author"--in the capitals of Europe, in literary circles in the United States, in the East Indies. He was "the gla.s.s of fashion ... the observ'd of all observers," the swayer of sentiment, the master and creator of popular emotion. No other English poet before or since has divided men's attention with generals and sea-captains and statesmen, has attracted and fascinated and overcome the world so entirely and potently as Lord Byron.

It was _Childe Harold_, the unfinished, immature _Childe Harold_, and the Turkish and other "Tales," which raised this sudden and deafening storm of applause when the century was young, and now, at its close (I refer, of course, to the Tales, not to Byron's poetry as a whole, which, in spite of the critics, has held and still holds its own), are ignored if not forgotten, pa.s.sed over if not despised--which but few know thoroughly, and "very few" are found to admire or to love. _Ubi lapsus, quid feci?_ might the questioning spirit of the author exclaim with regard to his "Harrys and Larrys, Pilgrims and Pirates," who once held the field, and now seem to have gone under in the struggle for poetical existence!

To what, then, may we attribute the pa.s.sing away of interest and enthusiasm? To the caprice of fashion, to an insistence on a more faultless _technique_, to a nicer taste in ethical sentiment, to a preference for a subtler treatment of loftier themes? More certainly, and more particularly, I think, to the blurring of outline and the blotting out of detail due to lapse of time and the shifting of the intellectual standpoint.

However much the charm of novelty and the contagion of enthusiasm may have contributed to the success of the Turkish and other Tales, it is in the last degree improbable that our grandfathers and great-grandfathers were enamoured, not of a reality, but of an illusion born of ignorance or of vulgar bewilderment. They were carried away because they breathed the same atmosphere as the singer; and being undistracted by ethical, or grammatical, or metrical offences, they not only read these poems with avidity, but understood enough of what they read to be touched by their vitality, to realize their verisimilitude.

_Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner._ Nay, more, the knowledge, the comprehension of essential greatness in art, in nature, or in man is not to know that there is aught to forgive. But that sufficing knowledge which the reader of average intelligence brings with him for the comprehension and appreciation of contemporary literature has to be bought at the price of close attention and patient study when the subject-matter of a poem and the modes and movements of the poet's consciousness are alike unfamiliar.

Criticism, however subtle, however suggestive, however luminous, will not bridge over the gap between the past and the present, will not supply the sufficing knowledge. It is delightful and interesting and, in a measure, instructive to know what great poets of his own time and of ours have thought of Byron, how he "strikes" them; but unless we are ourselves saturated with his thought and style, unless we learn to breathe his atmosphere by reading the books which he read, picturing to ourselves the scenes which he saw,--unless we aspire to his ideals and suffer his limitations, we are in no way ent.i.tled to judge his poems, whether they be good or bad.

Byron's metrical "Tales" come before us in the guise of light reading, and may be "easily criticized" as melo-dramatic--the heroines conventional puppets, the heroes reduplicated reflections of the author's personality, the Oriental "properties" loosely arranged, and somewhat stage-worn. A thorough and sympathetic study of these once extravagantly lauded and now belittled poems will not, perhaps, reverse the deliberate judgment of later generations, but it will display them for what they are, bold and rapid and yet exact presentations of the "gorgeous East," vivid and fresh from the hand of the great artist who conceived them out of the abundance of memory and observation, and wrought them into shape with the "pen of a ready writer." They will be once more recognized as works of genius, an integral portion of our literary inheritance, which has its proper value, and will repay a more a.s.siduous and a finer husbandry.

I have once more to acknowledge the generous a.s.sistance of the officials of the British Museum, and, more especially, of Mr. A. G. Ellis, of the Oriental Printed Books and MSS. Department, who has afforded me invaluable instruction in the compilation of the notes to the _Giaour_ and _Bride of Abydos_.

I have also to thank Mr. R. L. Binyon, of the Department of Prints and Drawings, for advice and a.s.sistance in the selection of ill.u.s.trations.

I desire to express my cordial thanks to the Registrar of the Copyright Office, Stationers' Hall; to Professor Jannaris, of the University of St. Andrews; to Miss E. Dawes, M.A., D.L., of Heathfield Lodge, Weybridge; to my cousin, Miss Edith Coleridge, of Goodrest, Torquay; and to my friend, Mr. Frank E. Taylor, of Chertsey, for information kindly supplied during the progress of the work.

For many of the "parallel pa.s.sages" from the works of other poets, which are to be found in the notes, I am indebted to a series of articles by A. A. Watts, in the _Literary Gazette,_ February and March, 1821; and to the notes to the late Professor E. Kolbing's _Siege of Corinth._

On behalf of the publisher, I beg to acknowledge the kindness of Lord Glenesk, and of Sir Theodore Martin, K.C.B., who have permitted the examination and collation of MSS. of the _Siege of Corinth_ and of the "Thyrza" poems, in their possession.

The original of the miniature of H.R.H. the Princess Charlotte of Wales (see p. 44) is in the Library of Windsor Castle. It has been reproduced for this volume by the gracious permission of Her Majesty the Queen.

ERNEST HARTLEY COLERIDGE.

_April_ 18, 1900.

INTRODUCTION TO THE _OCCASIONAL PIECES_ (_POEMS_ 1809-1813; _POEMS_ 1814-1816).

The Poems afterwards ent.i.tled "Occasional Pieces," which were included in the several editions of the Collected Works issued by Murray, 1819-1831, numbered fifty-seven in all. They may be described as the aggregate of the shorter poems written between the years 1809-1818, which the author thought worthy of a permanent place among his poetical works. Of these the first twenty-nine appeared in successive editions of _Childe Harold_ (Cantos I., II.) [viz. fourteen in the first edition, twenty in the second, and twenty-nine in the seventh edition], while the thirtieth, the _Ode on the Death of Sir Peter Parker_, was originally attached to _Hebrew Melodies_. The remaining twenty-seven pieces consist of six poems first published in the Second Edition of the _Corsair,_ 1814; eleven which formed the collection ent.i.tled "Poems," 1816; six which were appended to the _Prisoner of Chillon_, December, 1816; the _Very Mournful Ballad_, and the _Sonnet by Vittorelli_, which accompanied the Fourth Canto of _Childe Harold_, 1818; the _Sketch_, first included by Murray in his edition of 1819; and the _Ode to Venice_, which appeared in the same volume as _Mazeppa_.

Thus matters stood till 1831, when seventy new poems (sixty had been published by Moore, in _Letters and Journals_, 1830, six were republished from Hobhouse's _Imitations and Translations_, 1809, and four derived from other sources) were included in a sixth volume of the Collected Works.

In the edition of 1832-35, twenty-four new poems were added, but four which had appeared in _Letters and Journals_, 1830, and in the sixth volume of the edition of 1831 were omitted. In the one-volume edition (first issued in 1837 and still in print), the four short pieces omitted in 1832 once more found a place, and the lines on "John Keats," first published in _Letters and Journals_, and the two stanzas to Lady Caroline Lamb, "Remember thee! remember thee," first printed by Medwin, in the _Conversations of Lord Byron_, 1824, were included in the Collection.

The third volume of the present issue includes all minor poems (with the exception of epigrams and _jeux d'esprit_ reserved for the sixth volume) written after Byron's departure for the East in July, 1809, and before he left England for good in April, 1816.

The "Separation" and its consequent exile afforded a pretext and an opportunity for the publication of a crop of spurious verses. Of these _Madame Lavalette_ (first published in the _Examiner_, January 21, 1816, under the signature B. B., and immediately preceding a genuine sonnet by Wordsworth, "How clear, how keen, how marvellously bright!") and _Oh Shame to thee, Land of the Gaul!_ included by Hone, in _Poems on his Domestic Circ.u.mstances_, 1816; and _Farewell to England_, _Ode to the Isle of St. Helena_, _To the Lily of France_, _On the Morning of my Daughter's Birth_, published by J. Johnston, 1816, were repudiated by Byron, in a letter to Murray, dated July 22, 1816. A longer poem ent.i.tled _The Tempest_, which was attached to the spurious _Pilgrimage to the Holy Land_, published by Johnston, "the Cheapside impostor," in 1817, was also denounced by Byron as a forgery in a letter to Murray, dated December 16, 1816.

The _Triumph of the Whale_, by Charles Lamb, and the _Enigma on the Letter H_, by Harriet Fanshawe, were often included in piratical editions of Byron's _Poetical Works_. Other attributed poems which found their way into newspapers and foreign editions, viz. (i.) _To my dear Mary Anne_, 1804, "Adieu to sweet Mary for ever;" and (ii.) _To Miss Chaworth_, "Oh, memory, torture me no more," 1804, published in _Works of Lord Byron_, Paris, 1828; (iii.) lines written _In the Bible_, "Within this awful volume lies," quoted in _Life, Writings, Opinions, etc_., 1825, iii. 414; (iv.) lines addressed to (?) George Anson Byron, "And dost thou ask the reason of my sadness?" _Nicnac_, March 29, 1823; (v.) _To Lady Caroline Lamb_, "And sayst thou that I have not felt,"

published in _Works, etc_., 1828; (vi.) lines _To her who can best understand them_, "Be it so, we part for ever," published in the _Works of Lord Byron, In Verse and Prose_, Hartford, 1847; (vii.) _Lines found in the Travellers' Book at Chamouni_, "How many numbered are, how few agreed!" published _Works, etc_., 1828; and (viii.) a second copy of verses with the same t.i.tle, "All hail, Mont Blanc! Mont-au-Vert, hail!"

_Life, Writings, etc_., 1825, ii. 384; (ix.) _Lines addressed by Lord Byron to Mr. Hobhouse on his Election for Westminster_, "Would you get to the house by the true gate?" _Works, etc_., 1828; and (x.) _Enigma on the Letter I_, "I am not in youth, nor in manhood, nor age," _Works, etc_., Paris, p. 720, together with sundry epigrams, must, failing the production of the original MSS., be accounted forgeries, or, perhaps, in one or two instances, of doubtful authenticity.

The following poems: _On the Quotation_, "_And my true faith_" etc.; [_Love and Gold_]; _Julian_ [_a Fragment_]; and _On the Death of the Duke of Dorset_, are now published for the first time from MSS. in the possession of Mr. John Murray.

POEMS 1809-1813.

THE GIRL OF CADIZ.[1]

1.

Oh never talk again to me Of northern climes and British ladies; It has not been your lot to see,[a]

Like me, the lovely Girl of Cadiz.

Although her eye be not of blue, Nor fair her locks, like English la.s.ses, How far its own expressive hue The languid azure eye surpa.s.ses!

2.

Prometheus-like from heaven she stole The fire that through those silken lashes In darkest glances seems to roll, From eyes that cannot hide their flashes: And as along her bosom steal In lengthened flow her raven tresses, You'd swear each cl.u.s.tering lock could feel, And curled to give her neck caresses.

3.

Our English maids are long to woo,[b][2]

And frigid even in possession; And if their charms be fair to view, Their lips are slow at Love's confession; But, born beneath a brighter sun, For love ordained the Spanish maid is, And who,--when fondly, fairly won,-- Enchants you like the Girl of Cadiz?