ssence which had strength to kill;
From thy own heart I then did wring
The black blood in its blackest spring;
From thy own smile I snatched the snake,
For there it coiled as in a brake;
From thy own lips I drew the charm
Which gave all these their chiefest harm:
In proving every poison known,
I found the strongest was thine own.

By thy cold breast and serpent smile,
By thy unfathomed gulfs of guile,
By that most seeming virtuous eye,
By thy shut soul's hypocrisy,
By the perfection of thine art
Which passed for human thine own heart,
By thy delight in other's pain,
And by thy brotherhood of Cain,
I call upon thee, and compel
Thyself to be thy proper hell!'

Again: he represents Manfred as saying to the old abbot, who seeks to
bring him to repentance,--

'Old man, there is no power in holy men,
Nor charm in prayer, nor purifying form
Of penitence, nor outward look, nor fast,
Nor agony, nor greater than all these,
The innate tortures of that deep despair,
Which is remorse without the fear of hell,
But, all in all sufficient to itself,
Would make a hell of heaven, can exorcise
From out the unbounded spirit the quick sense
Of its own sins, wrongs, sufferance, and revenge
Upon itself: there is no future pang
Can deal that justice on the self-condemned
He deals on his own soul.'

And when the abbot tells him,

'All this is well;
For this will pass away, and be succeeded
By an auspicious hope, which shall look up
With calm assurance to that blessed place
Which all who seek may win, whatever be
Their earthly errors,'

he answers,

'It is too late.'

Then the old abbot soliloquises:--

'This should have been a noble creature: he
Hath all the energy which would have made
A goodly frame of glorious elements,
Had they been wisely mingled; as it is,
It is an awful chaos,--light and darkness,
And mind and dust, and passions and pure thoughts,
Mixed, and contending without end or order.'

The world can easily see, in Moore's Biography, what, after this, was the
course of Lord Byron's life; how he went from shame to shame, and
dishonour to dishonour, and used the fortune which his wife brought him
in the manner described in those private letters which his biographer was
left to print. Moore, indeed, says Byron had made the resolution not to
touch his lady's fortune; but