"The secret sensibility which lurks within our bosoms, which pervades the whole animated frame, and transmitsthrough it the indications of joy or grief, of pleasure or pain, but of which the excess is suffocating and unutterable, cannot itself become the subject of description. To attempt such description is, we think, to exceed the legitimate pretensions of poetry, and to invade the province of metaphysics." [George Ellis (attrib.), rev. of (1) The Corsair; (2) Lara, by Lord Byron, Quarterly Review, (July 1814), 457].
Byron of Rome in a letter to Murray: "As a whole, ancient and modern, it beats Greece, Constantinople, every thing--at least that I have ever seen. But I can't describe, because my first impressions are always strong and confused, and my Memory selects and reduces them to order, like distance in the landscape, and blends them better, although they may be less distinct."
Byron. Ed. Jerome J. McGann. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986.
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
She looks a sea Cybele, fresh from ocean,
Rising with her tiara of proud towers
At airy distance, with majestic motion,
A ruler of the waters and their powers:
And such se was;--her daughters had their dowers
From spoils of nations, and the exhaustless East
Pour'd in her lap all gems in sparking showers (IV,10-16).
Manfred Composed between summer, 1816 and April 1817; published in June. Byron's most Nietzschean work: an exploration of the meaning, even the possibility, of integrity and selfhood. Exploration undertaken in circumstances where all the customary internal and external ideological supports have been removed. Byron's marriage collapsed and he fled England during its writing. Gothicism is important.
Philosophy and science, and the springs
Of wonder, and the wisdom of the world,
I have essayed, and in my mind there is
A power to make these subject ot itself--
But they avail not" (I,i,13-17).
"the passions, attributes
Of earth and heaven, from which no power, nor being,
Nor breath from the worm upwards is exempt,
Have pierced his heart" (II,iv,64-67).
Darkness: written early summer, 1816. Published 1817.
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came, and went--and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires (1-10).
The world was void,
The populous and the powerful--was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless--
A lump of death--a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirred within theri silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal; as they dropp'd
They slept on the abyss without a surge--
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon their mistress had expired before;
The winds were withered in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them--She was the universe (69-82).
Thomas Medwin's Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron (1824). Conversation recorded in late 1821 and early 1822. Following from 1822:
"Of the Immortality of the Soul--it appears to me that there can be little doubt--if we attend for a moment to the action of Mind.--It is in perpetual activity;--I used to doubt of it--but reflection has taught me better.--It acts also so very independent of body--in dreams for instance incoherently and madly--I grant you;--but still it is Mind & much more Mind--than when we are awake.-- --Now--that this should not act separately--as well as jointly--who can pronounce?" (1016).
"Matter is eternal--always changing--but reproduced and as far as we can comprehend Eternity--Eternal--and why not Mind?--Why should not the Mind act with and upon the Universe?" (1016).
"I am always most religious upon a sunshiny day--as if there was some association between an internal approach to greater light and purity--and the kindler of this dark lantern of our external existence" (1017).
"The Night is also a religious concern--and even more so--when I viewed the Moon and Stars through Herschell's telescope--and saw that they were worlds" (1017).
"A Creator is a more natural imagination than a fortuitous concourse of atoms--all things remount to a fountain--though they may flow to an Ocean" (1017).
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair'd the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.
And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!
--Lord Byron