, the charming and sublime
aspect of nature.

"Yet not insensible to all which here
Awoke the jocund birds to early song
In glens which might have made even exile dear;
Though on his brow were graven lines austere,
And tranquil sternness, which had ta'en the place
Of feelings fiercer far but less severe,
Joy was not always absent from his face,
But o'er it in such scenes would steal with transient trace."

No longer, then, is satiety depicted upon the pilgrim's brow, but "lines
austere;" and the poet seems so desirous of proving to us that Harold is
metamorphosed, that when he expresses sentiments full of sympathy,
humanity, and goodness, his horror for war and his dislike for the
beauties of the Rhine, because--

"A thousand battles have assail'd thy banks,"

he takes care to add--

"Thus Harold inly said"....

Harold, then, has ceased to be the weary _blase_ pilgrim of twenty-one,
who in the first canto remains unmoved in presence of the attractions of
Florence the beautiful, who inspired the poet with such different
sentiments that in the midst even of a storm which threatens to swallow
him up he actually finds strength enough to express his sentiments of
real love for the lovely absent one--of a love, indeed, which is
evidently returned. His heart, like the poet's, now beats with a pure
love, and causes him to chant the absence of his friend in the most
beautiful strain. Where is the old Harold? It would seem as if the poet,
tired of a companion so disagreeable and so opposed to his tastes, and
wishing to get rid of him but not knowing how, had first changed and
moulded him to his own likeness by giving him his own sentiments, his
own great heart, his own pains, his own affections, and, not finding the
change natural, had dismissed him altogether. And so it appears, for
after the fifty-fifth stanza of the third canto, Childe Harold
disappears forever. Thus at the beginning of the fourth canto, which was
published a year after, under the auspices of an Italian sky, the reader
finds himself in the presence of the poet only. He meets in him a great
and generous soul, but the victim of the most odious and unmerited
persecution, who takes his revenge in forgiving the wrongs which are
done to him, and who reserves all his energies to consecrate them to the
love of that which is lovable, to the admiration of that which calls for
it, and who at twenty-nine years of age is imbue