in the ravishing sweetness of a perfumed atmosphere; as when, standing alone at midnight, in the deep darkness of a polar season, when the moon rides high, and the stars shone unclouded, when the dry icicles crackle in the breeze, and sparkle as they fall shivered into tiny diamonds, the solemn spirit of metaphysical contemplation thrills a low symphony of feeling and of awe that the melting rays of a southern sun could never reach. So great was Byron’s versatility; and, yielding ever to the influence of the moment, so did he throw off at times the characteristic poetry of all climes, all people, and all moods: and, if there is no one kind in which he has not been surpassed; through his versatility and boldness his fame has not dimmed in the contrast. The characteristic of southern poetry is a materialising even of the spiritual; that of northern poetry, a spiritualizing, an etherealizing even of the material. Even the northern and southern tongues, though all springing from the same root, are modified and characterized by the tone and natural feeling which climate and association have diversified. In southern tongues, sounds seem such as those that the soul of music and of feeling might give vent to, as through the lips it passes to liberty away; in northern tongues sounds seem each as the soul of thought and feeling might mutter when their confined power is aroused to action within us. How different and characteristic are Lord Byron’s descriptions where, in one, describing the voluptuous Dudù, he says with true southern softness: “She was not violently lively, but Stole on your senses like a May-day breaking.” Ekeing out the materialised comparison with redundant melody; and when, with stern northern contemplation he realises that “There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society where none intrudes By the deep sea, and music in its roar. I love not man the less, but Nature more, From these our interviews, in which I steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the universe, and feel What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.”