wound, and then,
To find it trivial, smiled and wept again.
She was a warrior's daughter, and could bear
Such sights, and feel, and mourn, but not despair.
Her lover lived,--nor foes nor fears could blight,
That full-blown moment in its all delight:
Joy trickled in her tears, joy filled the sob
That rock'd her heart till almost heard to throb;
And paradise was breathing in the sigh
Of nature's child in nature's ecstasy."

"All these sweet creations realize the idea, formed from all time, of
surpassing loveliness, of gentleness with passion," justly observes
Monsieur Nisard--he who, in his very clever sketch of the illustrious
poet, so often forms erroneous judgments of Lord Byron. For he also
accepted him as he was presented--namely, as the victim of calumny and
prejudice; or else he considered him after a system, examining only some
_passages and one single period_ of the man's and the _poet's_ life,
instead of taking the whole career and the general spirit of his
writings,--a method also perceivable in his appreciation of Lord Byron's
female characters.

Indeed Monsieur Nisard evidently only speaks of the Medoras, Zuleikas,
Leilas, and in general of all the types in his Eastern poems, and
appertaining to his first period: most fascinating beings undoubtedly,
true emanations of the purest and most passionate love, but yet as
morally inferior to the Angiolinas, Myrrhas, Josephines, Auroras, as his
poems of the first period are intellectually inferior to those of the
second, beginning with the third canto of "Childe Harold," and as
civilized Christian woman is superior to a woman in the harem. But
Monsieur Nisard, who has a very systematic way of judging
things--wishing to prove that Lord Byron's loves were quite lawless in
their ungovernable strength, filling the whole soul to the absorption of
every other sentiment and interest (which might, indeed, perhaps be said
of the personages in his Eastern poems), and not able, without
contradicting himself, to assert the same as regards the love and
devotion shown by the heroic Myrrhas and virtuous Angiolinas, and other
dramatic types, all so different one from the other--has been obliged to
omit all mention of them, thus sharing an error common to vain, ignorant
critics. Yet these delightful creatures all resemble each other in the
one faculty of _loving passionately and chastely_, for that is a quality
which constitutes the very essence of woman, and L