"Our spirit burns within us, but our limbs are palsied, and our feet must brush the heather no more. Lo, how beautifully those fast-travelling pointers do their work on that black mountain's breast; intersecting it into parallelograms and squares and circles, and now all a-stoop on a sudden, as if frozen to death. Higher up among the rocks and cliffs and stones, we see a stripling whose ambition it is to strike the sky with his forehead, and wet his hair in the misty cloud, pursuing the ptarmigan. . . . Never shall eld deaden our sympathies with the pastimes of our fellow-men, any more than with their highest raptures, their profoundest griefs." It is safe to say that he kept his word, and was to the last, the same genial, warm-hearted, impulsive, wayward man who had by these and other engaging qualities made for himself so large a place in the heart of his countrymen, during the long years he had wandered over her moors and hills, seeing all her beauties, and describing them as no other had done. He was almost the last of that band of strong men who cast such lustre over the beginning of this century. Coleridge had gone before, and Wordsworth, Byron, and Campbell, Shelley, and Canning, and Peel, and Jeffrey, and Moore, and he lingered on in a solitude made greater by that last stroke of calamity which deprived him of motion for a time that was weary and heart-breaking to him, and over which the world yet sheds its sympathizing tears. He died at the age of sixty-eight. [Illustration] [Illustration] LORD BYRON. So many volumes have been written about the domestic life and the loves of Lord Byron, that it would be a hopeless undertaking to attempt to say anything new about them. But the story of Byron's life will never lose its fascination, and to every new generation of readers the romance will be fresh. Marvellously beautiful, wonderfully gifted, unfortunately constituted man; wronged by his birth, wronged by his education, wronged most of all by himself, the world will never cease to wonder and to weep when his tragic story is told. While the language remains his words will live. Immortal poetry for youth!--new generations will learn it by heart, when the older generations are forgetting; and long after all memory of his waywardness and folly has faded from the world, his deathless songs will still sing on. In any attempt to understand Byron, his ancestry must be much considered. It will never do to compare him with cool-headed, calm-blooded, matter-of-fact people. He was the peculiar product of a peculiar race. Coming through generations of hot, turbulent blood, which was never once mastered or tamed by its possessors, he entered the world with a temperament and disposition which made it simply impossible that he should lead the ordinary life of the British Philistine of his day.