“One vast mass Of mingling shade, whose brown magnificence A narrow vale embosoms. The pyramids Of the tall cedar, overarching, frame Most solemn domes within; and far below, Like clouds suspended in an emerald sky, The ash and the acacia floating, hang Tremulous and pale. Like restless serpents clothed In rainbow and in fire, the parasites Starred with ten thousand blossoms flowed around The gray trunks; and as gamesome infants’ eyes, With gentle meanings and most innocent wiles Fold their beams round the hearts of those that love, These twine their tendrils with the wedded boughs. … the woven leaves Make net-work of the dark blue lights of day And the night’s noontide clearness, mutable As shapes in the weird clouds. One darkest glen Sends from its woods of musk-rose twined with jasmine A soul-dissolving odor, to invite To some more lovely mystery. Through the dell Silence and twilight here, twin sisters, keep Their noonday watch, and sail among the shades Like vaporous shapes half seen.” And such mysteries and vaporous shapes run through all his poetic world. He wanders, with that rarely fine gift of rhythmic speech, as wide away from the compact sordid world--upon which Byron always sets foot with a ringing tread--as ever Spenser in his chase of rainbow creations. Yet there were penetrative sinuous influences about that young poet--defiant of law and wrapt in his pursuit of mysteries--which may well have given foreign touches of color to Byron’s _Manfred_ or to his _Prometheus_. At any rate, these two souls lay quietly for a time, warped together--like two vessels windbound under mountain shelter. _Byron in Italy._ Byron next goes southward, to riotous life in Venice; where--whether in tradesmen’s houses or in palaces upon the Grand Canal, or in country villas upon the Euganean hills--he defies priests and traditions, and order, and law, and decency. To this period belongs, probably, the conception, if not the execution, of many of those dramas[73]--as non-playable as ever those of Tennyson--unequal, too, but with passages scattered here and there of great beauty; masterly aggregation of words smoking with passion, and full of such bullet-like force of expression as only he could command; but there is no adequate blending of parts to make either stately or well-harmonized march of events toward large and definite issues.