in Æschylus; in both, we hear the solemn choral songs of old men and virgins; and in both, the object of the poet's art is to shew that the stain of unhallowed passion must ever have its origin in a curse, and be blotted out in the blood of some tearful expiation. Who does not remember the woeful cry of Isabella?
"O! when shall that old curse dissolve away,
Which sits with weight of misery on our house."
The daring spirit of Byron has twice ventured to tread upon the same awful ground. He has represented, both in Manfred and in Parasina, the mutual love of conscious incest. In the first, indeed, we gather only from mysterious hints, that the inexplicable being before us has had his heart torn asunder by the agonies of an unlawful passion for his sister. But we feel not for him the same sympathy which makes us partakers in the thoughts and actions of ordinary men. We perceive that he holds strange converse with spirits and demons, and we do not wonder that he should be the victim of an unearthly flame. Besides, before his guilt is revealed to us, his punishment, like that of Cain, has been greater than he could bear. We see in him a weary wasted hater of the world, and of himself; Let us hear his own words:
"Daughter of Air! I tell thee, since that hour—
But words are breath—look on me in my sleep,
Or watch my watchings;—Come and sit by me!
My solitude is solitude no more,
But peopled with the furies;—I have gnash'd
My teeth in darkness till returning morn,
Then cursed myself till sunset;—I have pray'd
For madness as a blessing—'tis denied me.
I have affronted death—but in the war
Of elements the waters shrunk from me,
And fatal things passed harmless—the cold hand
Of an all-pitiless demon held me back,
Back by a single hair which would not break.
In phantasy, imagination, all
The affluence of my soul—which one day was
A Crœsus in creation—I plunged deep,
But like an ebbing wave, it dash'd me back
Into the gulph of my unfathom'd thought.
I plunged amidst mankind. Forgetfulness
I sought in all save where 'tis to be found,
And that I have to learn—my sciences,
My long pursued and super-human art,
Is mortal here—I dwell in my despair—
And live—and live for ever."
The frail partner of his guilt has already died, not of violence but of grief; and when she appears, we see in her, not the sinful woman, but the judged and pardoned spirit. He who derives a single stain of impurity from Manfred, must come to its perusal with a soul which is not worthy of being clean.
To none of these poems, however, does the subject of Rimini bear so great a resemblance as to Parasina, and it is this very circumstance of likeness which brings before us in the strongest colours the difference between the incest of Leigh Hunt and the incest of Byron. In Parasina, we are scarcely permitted to have a single glance at the guilt before our attention is rivetted upon the punishment. We have scarcely had time to condemn, within our own hearts, the sinning, though injured son, when—
"For a departing being's soul
The death-hymn peals and the hollow bells knoll;
He is near his mortal goal;
Kneeling at the Friar's knee,
Sad to hear—and piteous to see—
Kneeling on the bare cold ground,
With the block before and the guards around;
And the headsman with his bare arm ready,
That the blow may be both swift and steady,
Feels if the axe be sharp and true—
Since he set its edge anew;
While the crowd in a speechless circle gather
To see the Son fall by the doom of the Father."
The fatal guilt of the Princess is in like manner swallowed up in the dreary contemplation of her uncertain fate. We forbear to think of her as an adulteress, after we have heard that horrid voice which is sent up to heaven at the death of her paramour:
"Whatsoe'er its end below,
Her life began and closed in woe."
Not only has Lord Byron avoided all the details of this unhallowed love, he has also contrived to mingle in the very incest which he condemns the idea of retribution; and our horror for the sin of Hugo is diminished by our belief that it was brought about by some strange and super-human fatality, to revenge the ruin of Bianca. That gloom of righteous visitation, which invests in the old Greek tragedies the fated house of Atreus, seems here to impend with some portion of its ancient horror over the line of Esté. We hear, in the language of Hugo, the voice of the same prophetic solemnity which announced to Agamemnon, in the very moment of his triumph, the
