t in the third canto is in verse a
splendid microcosm of the favourites, if not the prevailing mood, of the
writer's mind. In spite of manifest flaws, the nine stanzas beginning "It
is the hush of night," have enough in them to feed a high reputation. The
poet's dying day, his sun and moon contending over the Rhaetian hill, his
Thrasymene, Clitumnus, and Velino, show that his eye has grown keener, and
his imagery at least more terse, and that he can occasionally forgot
himself in his surroundings. The Drachenfels, Ehrenbreitstein, the Alps,
Lake Leman, pass before us like a series of dissolving views. But the
stability of the book depends on its being a Temple of Fame, as well as a
Diorama of Scenery. It is no mere versified Guide, because every
resting-place in the pilgrimage is made interesting by association with
illustrious memories. Coblontz introduces the tribute to Marceau; Clarens
an almost complete review, in five verses, of Rousseau; Lausanne and
Ferney the quintessence of criticism on Gibbon and Voltaire. A tomb in
Arqua suggests Petrarch; the grass-grown streets of Ferrara lead in the
lines on Tasso; the white walls of the Etrurian Athens bring back
Alfieri and Michael Angelo, and the prose bard of the hundred tales, and
Dante, "buried by the upbraiding shore," and--

The starry Galileo and his woes.

Byron has made himself so master of the glories and the wrecks of Rome,
that almost everything else that has been said of them seems superfluous.
Hawthorne, in his _Marble Fawn_, comes nearest to him; but Byron's
Gladiator and Apollo, if not his Laocoon, are unequalled. "The voice of
Marius," says Scott, "could not sound more deep and solemn among the ruins
of Carthage, than the strains of the pilgrim among the broken shrines and
fallen statues of her subduer." As the third canto has a fitting close
with the poet's pathetic remembrance of his daughter, so the fourth is
wound up with consummate art,--the memorable dirge on the Princess
Charlotte being followed by the address to the sea, which, enduring
unwrinkled through all its ebbs and flows, seems to mock at the mutability
of human life.

_Manfred_, his witch drama, as the author called it, has had a special
attraction for inquisitive biographers, because it has been supposed in
some dark manner to reveal the secrets of his prison house. Its lines have
been tortured, like the witches of the seventeenth century, to extort from
them the meaning of the "