a later period, he confined himself to a positive worship of nature,
which appeared to him then in the glorious shape of the mountains and
lakes of Helvetia. Wordsworth was his oracle, and thus cultivating a
poetry which deified nature, Shelley, in reality, remained at heart an
atheist, and doubtless tried to imbue Byron with his enthusiasm and with
his opinions.

Himself greatly delighted with the beauties of the scenery in the midst
of which they lived, and, as he was wont to say in laughter, having
received many large doses of Wordsworth from Shelley, Lord Byron wrote
several stanzas in which the same enthusiasm may be met with, recorded
in terms almost of adoration.

It was only a poetical form, however, a poetical illusion, which was
succeeded by stanzas in which God himself as our creator, was loudly
proclaimed. If in the seventy-second and following stanzas of the third
canto, opinions were expressed which savored of pantheistic tendencies,
they were at once followed by some such as these:--

"All heaven and earth are still--though not in sleep,
But breathless, as we grow when feeling most;
And silent, as we stand in thought too deep:--
All heaven and earth are still: from the high host
Of stars to the lull'd lake and mountain-coast,
All is concentred in a life intense,
Where not a beam, nor air, nor leaf is lost,
But hath a part of being, and a sense
Of that which is of all _Creator_ and _Defense_."

And again, on viewing the Alps, he writes the poem of "Manfred," in
which his belief in a One God, and Creator, is expressed in sublime
lines. His repugnance to atheism and to materialism is testified not
only in his poetry, but also by his own actions.

On reaching Montauvert with his friend Hobhouse, and on the point of
ascending Mont Blanc with him, he found Shelley's name in the register
of the travellers, and under it the qualification of "atheist" written
in Shelley's own hand. Lord Byron at once scratched it out. But on
reading, a little below, a remark by another traveller, who had justly
rebuked Shelley's folly, Byron added the words, "The appellation is well
deserved."

He soon after left the Alps, and came to Italy, without his views,
either philosophical or religious, being in the least altered by the
seductions of "that serpent," as he jokingly denominated Shelley.

We shall now follow him, step by step, until the end of his life, and we
shall see whether he w