“Lugano Gazette did not come. Letters from Venice. It appears that the Austrian brutes have seized my—three or four pounds of English powder. The scoundrels!—I hope to pay them in ball for that powder. Rode out till twilight.
“Pondered the subjects of four tragedies to be written (life and circumstances permitting), to wit, Sardanapalus, already begun; Cain, a metaphysical subject, something in the style of Manfred, but in five acts, perhaps, with the chorus; Francesca of Rimini, in five acts; and I am not sure that I would not try Tiberius. I think that I could extract a something, of my tragic, at least, out of the gloomy sequestration and old age of the tyrant—and even out of his sojourn at Caprea—by softening the details, and exhibiting the despair which must have led to those very vicious pleasures. For none but a powerful and gloomy mind overthrown would have had recourse to such solitary horrors,—being also, at the same time, old, and the master of the world.
“What is Poetry?—The feeling of a Former world and Future.
“Why, at the very height of desire and human
pleasure,—worldly, social, amorous, ambitious, or even avaricious,—does there mingle a
certain sense of doubt and sorrow—a fear of what is to come—a doubt of what is—a
retrospect to the past, leading to a prognostication of the future. (The best of
Prophets of the future is the Past.) Why is this? or these?—I know not, except that on a
pinnacle we are most susceptible of giddiness, and that we never fear falling except
from a precipice—the higher, the more awful, and the more sublime; and, therefore, I am
not sure that Fear is not a pleasurable sensation; at least, Hope
is; and what Hope is there without a deep leaven of Fear? and
what sensation is so delightful as Hope? and, if it were not for Hope, where would the
Future be?—in hell. It is useless to say where the Present is,
for most of us know; and as for the Past, what predominates in
memory?—Hope baffled. Ergo, in all human affairs, it is
Hope—Hope—Hope. I allow sixteen minutes, though I never counted them, to any given or
supposed
| 420 | NOTICES OF THE | A. D. 1821. |
|
“Were Death an evil, would
I let thee live?
Fool! live as I live—as thy father lives,
And thy son’s sons shall live for evermore.
|
“I have been reading W. F. S * * (brother to the other of the name) till now, and I can make out nothing. He evidently shows a great power of words, but there is nothing to be taken hold of. He is like Hazlitt, in English, who talks pimples—a red and white corruption rising up (in little imitation of mountains upon maps), but containing nothing, and discharging nothing, except their own humours.
“I dislike him the worse (that is, S * *), because he always seems upon the verge of meaning; and, lo, he goes down like sunset, or melts like a rainbow, leaving a rather rich confusion,—to which, however, the above comparisons do too much honour.
“Continuing to read Mr. F. S * *. He is not such a fool as I took him for, that is to say, when he speaks of the North. But still he speaks of things all over the world with a kind of authority that a philosopher would disdain, and a man of common sense, feeling, and
* Thus marked, with impatient strokes of the pen, by himself in the original. |
| A. D. 1821. | LIFE OF LORD BYRON. | 421 |
“It is high time to think of something else. What they say of the antiquities of the North is best.
