it was come to love me when
None lived to love me so again,
And cheering from my dungeon's brink,
Had brought me back to feel and think.
I know not if it late were free,
Or broke its cage to perch on mine,
But knowing well captivity,
Sweet bird! I could not wish for thine!
Or if it were, in winged guise,
A visitant from Paradise;
For--Heaven forgive that thought! the while
Which made me both to weep and smile--
I sometimes deem'd that it might be
My brother's soul come down to me;
But then at last away it flew,
And then 'twas mortal well I knew,
For he would never thus have flown,
And left me twice so doubly lone,
Lone as the corse within its shroud,
Lone as a solitary cloud,--
A single cloud on a sunny day,
While all the rest of heaven is clear,
A frown upon the atmosphere,
That hath no business to appear
When skies are blue, and earth is gay.
(_The Prisoner of Chillon._)

Unhappily, all these shifting scenes of imagination or experience--so
the poet has made mournful confession--have little power to wean him
from himself. "Neither the music of the shepherd, the crashing of the
avalanche, nor the torrent, the mountain, the glacier, the forest, nor
the cloud, have for one moment lightened the weight upon my heart, nor
enabled me to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty, and the
power, and the glory, above, around, and beneath me."

And although, it will be noticed, he exempts the sea--and although the
blood of old sea-kings, running fiercely in his veins, still kindles him
to imperishable rapture in its presence,--

And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy
Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be
Borne, like thy bubbles, onward: from a boy
I wanton'd with thy breakers--they to me
Were a delight; and if the freshening sea
Made them a terror--'twas a pleasing fear,
For I was as it were a child of thee,
And trusted to thy billows far and near,
And laid my hand upon thy mane--as I do here.
(_Childe Harold._)

--yet there is sorrow on the sea itself,--the "unplumb'd, salt, estranging
sea" which separates him from his mother-country. Cosmopolitan as he
is, self-banished exile, quick with Greek and Italian sympathies,
Byron never for one moment forgets that he is head of one of England's
proudest families. Despite his scathing scorn towards h