[275] {209} [D'Alembert (Jean-le-Rond, philosopher, mathematician, and belletrist, 1717-1783) had recently lost his friend, Mlle. (Claire Françoise) L'Espinasse, who died May 23, 1776. Frederick prescribes quelque problème bien difficile à résoudre as a remedy for vain regrets (Oeuvres de Frédéric II., Roi de Prusse, 1790, xiv. 64, 65).]
[276] {215} ["If you turn over the earlier pages of the Huntingdon peerage story, you will see how common a name Ada was in the early Plantagenet days. I found it in my own pedigree in the reigns of John and Henry.... It is short, ancient, vocalic, and had been in my family; for which reasons I gave it to my daughter."—Letter to Murray, Ravenna, October 8, 1820.
The Honourable Augusta Ada Byron was born December 10, 1815; was married July 8, 1835, to William King Noel (1805-1893), eighth Baron King, created Earl of Lovelace, 1838; and died November 27, 1852. There were three children of the marriage—Viscount Ockham (d. 1862), the present Earl of Lovelace, and the Lady Anna Isabella Noel, who was married to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Esq., in 1869.
"The Countess of Lovelace," wrote a contributor to the Examiner, December 4, 1852, "was thoroughly original, and the poet's temperament was all that was hers in common with her father. Her genius, for genius she possessed, was not poetic, but metaphysical and mathematical, her mind having been in the constant practice of investigation, and with rigour and exactness." Of her devotion to science, and her original powers as a mathematician, her translation and explanatory notes of F. L. Menabrea's Notices sur le machine Analytique de Mr. Babbage, 1842, a defence of the famous "calculating machine," remain as evidence.
"Those who view mathematical science not merely as a vast body of abstract and immutable truths, ... but as possessing a yet deeper interest for the human race, when it is remembered that this science constitutes the language through which alone we can adequately express the great facts of the natural world ... those who thus think on mathematical truth as the instrument through which the weak mind of man can most effectually read his Creator's works, will regard with especial interest all that can tend to facilitate the translation of its principles into explicit practical forms." So, for the moment turning away from algebraic formulæ and abstruse calculations, wrote Ada, Lady Lovelace, in her twenty-eighth year. See "Translator's Notes," signed A. A. L., to A Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage, Esq., London, 1843.
It would seem, however, that she "wore her learning lightly as a flower." "Her manners [Examiner], her tastes, her accomplishments, in many of which, music especially, she was proficient, were feminine in the nicest sense of the word." Unlike her father in features, or in the bent of her mind, she inherited his mental vigour and intensity of purpose. Like him, she died in her thirty-seventh year, and at her own request her coffin was placed by his in the vault at Hucknall Torkard. (See, too, Athenæum, December 4, 1852, and Gent. Mag., January, 1853.)]
[277] Compare Henry V., act iii. sc. 1, line 1—"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more."
[278] {217} [Compare The Two Noble Kinsmen (now attributed to Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Massinger), act ii. sc. 1, lines 73, seq.—
"Out of this somewhat forced simile," says the editor (John Wright) of Lord Byron's Poetical Works, issued in 1832, "by a judicious transposition of the comparison, and by the substitution of the more definite waves for seas, Lord Byron's clear and noble thought has been produced." But the literary artifice, if such there be, is subordinate to the emotion of the writer. It is in movement, progress, flight, that the sufferer experiences a relief from the poignancy of his anguish.]
[gi] And the rent canvass tattering——.—[C.]
[279] ["The metaphor is derived from a torrent-bed, which, when dried up, serves for a sandy or shingly path."—Note by H. F. Tozer, Childe Harold, 1885, p. 257. Or, perhaps, the imagery has been suggested by the action of a flood, which ploughs a channel for itself through fruitful soil, and, when the waters are spent, leaves behind it "a sterile track," which does, indeed, permit the traveller to survey the desolation, but serves no other purpose of use or beauty.]
[280] [Compare Manfred, act ii. sc. 1, lines 51, 52—
[281] [It is the poet's fond belief that he can find the true reality in "the things that are not seen."
"Life is but thought," and by the power of the imagination he thinks to "gain a being more intense," to add a cubit to his spiritual stature. Byron professes the same faith in The Dream (stanza i. lines 19-22), which also belongs to the summer of 1816—
At this stage of his poetic growth, in part converted by Shelley, in part by Wordsworth as preached by Shelley, Byron, so to speak, "got religion," went over for a while to the Church of the mystics. There was, too, a compulsion from within. Life had gone wrong with him, and, driven from memory and reflection, he looks for redemption in the new earth which Imagination and Nature held in store.]
[282] [Compare The Dream, viii. 6, seq.—
[gn] To bear unbent what Time cannot abate.—[MS.]
[283] [Of himself as distinct from Harold he will say no more. On the tale or spell of his own tragedy is set the seal of silence; but of Harold, the idealized Byron, he once more takes up the parable. In stanzas viii.-xv. he puts the reader in possession of some natural changes, and unfolds the development of thought and feeling which had befallen the Pilgrim since last they had journeyed together. The youthful Harold had sounded the depth of joy and woe. Man delighted him not—no, nor woman neither. For a time, however, he had cured himself of this trick of sadness. He had drunk new life from the fountain of natural beauty and antique lore, and had returned to take his part in the world, inly armed against dangers and temptations. And in the world he had found beauty, and fame had found him. What wonder that he had done as others use, and then discovered that he could not fare as others fared? Henceforth there remained no comfort but in nature, no refuge but in exile!]
[gq] Shines through the wonder-works—of God and Nature's hand.—[MS.]
[gs] Nor feel how Wisdom ceases to be cold.—[MS. erased.]
[284] [The Temple of Fame is on the summit of a mountain; "Clouds overcome it;" but to the uplifted eye the mists dispel, and behold the goddess pointing to her star—the star of glory!]
[285] [Compare Manfred, act ii. sc. 2, lines 50-58—
Compare, too, with stanzas xiii., xiv., ibid., lines 58-72.]
[gu] Fool he not to know.—[MS. erased.]
[gx] That keeps us from that Heaven on which we love to think.—[MS.]
[286] {225} [In this stanza the mask is thrown aside, and "the real Lord Byron" appears in propriâ personâ.]
[287] [The mound with the Belgian lion was erected by William I. of Holland, in 1823.]
[288] [Stanzas xvii., xviii., were written after a visit to Waterloo. When Byron was in Brussels, a friend of his boyhood, Pryse Lockhart Gordon, called upon him and offered his services. He escorted him to the field of Waterloo, and received him at his house in the evening. Mrs. Gordon produced her album, and begged for an autograph. The next morning Byron copied into the album the two stanzas which he had written the day before. Lines 5-8 of the second stanza (xviii.) ran thus—
The autograph suggested an illustration to an artist, R. R. Reinagle (1775-1863), "a pencil-sketch of a spirited chained eagle, grasping the earth with his talons." Gordon showed the vignette to Byron, who wrote in reply, "Reinagle is a better poet and a better ornithologist than I am; eagles and all birds of prey attack with their talons and not with their beaks, and I have altered the line thus—
(See Personal Memoirs of Pryse Lockhart Gordon, 1830, ii. 327, 328.)]
[ha] ——and still must be.—[MS.]
[hb] ——the fatal Waterloo.—[MS.]
[289] [With this "obstinate questioning" of the final import and outcome of "that world-famous Waterloo," compare the Ode from the French, "We do not curse thee, Waterloo," written in 1815, and published by John Murray in Poems (1816). Compare, too, The Age of Waterloo, v. 93, "Oh, bloody and most bootless Waterloo!" and Don Juan, Canto VIII. stanzas xlviii.-l., etc. Shelley, too, in his sonnet on the Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte (1816), utters a like lament (Shelley's Works, 1895, ii. 385)—
Even Wordsworth, after due celebration of this "victory sublime," in his sonnet Emperors and Kings, etc. (Works, 1889, p. 557), solemnly admonishes the "powers"—
But the Laureate had no misgivings, and in The Poet's Pilgrimage, iv. 60, celebrates the national apotheosis—
[290] [The most vivid and the best authenticated account of the Duchess of Richmond's ball, which took place June 15, the eve of the Battle of Quatrebras, in the duke's house in the Rue de la Blanchisserie, is to be found in Lady de Ros's (Lady Georgiana Lennox) Personal Recollections of the Great Duke of Wellington, which appeared first in Murray's Magazine, January and February, 1889, and were republished as A Sketch of the Life of Georgiana, Lady de Ros, by her daughter, the Hon. Mrs. J. R. Swinton (John Murray, 1893). "My mother's now famous ball," writes Lady de Ros (A Sketch, etc., pp. 122, 123), "took place in a large room on the ground-floor on the left of the entrance, connected with the rest of the house by an ante-room. It had been used by the coachbuilder, from whom the house was hired, to put carriages in, but it was papered before we came there; and I recollect the paper—a trellis pattern with roses.... When the duke arrived, rather late, at the ball, I was dancing, but at once went up to him to ask about the rumours. 'Yes, they are true; we are off to-morrow.' This terrible news was circulated directly, and while some of the officers hurried away, others remained at the ball, and actually had not time to change their clothes, but fought in evening costume."]
[291] [Frederick William, Duke of Brunswick (1771-1815), brother to Caroline, Princess of Wales, and nephew of George III., fighting at Quatrebras in the front of the line, "fell almost in the beginning of the battle." His father, Charles William Ferdinand, born 1735, the author of the fatal manifesto against the army of the French Republic (July 15, 1792), was killed at Auerbach, October 14, 1806. In the plan of the Duke of Richmond's house, which Lady de Ros published in her Recollections, the actual spot is marked (the door of the ante-room leading to the ball-room) where Lady Georgiana Lennox took leave of the Duke of Brunswick. "It was a dreadful evening," she writes, "taking leave of friends and acquaintances, many never to be seen again. The Duke of Brunswick, as he took leave of me ... made me a civil speech as to the Brunswickers being sure to distinguish themselves after 'the honour' done them by my having accompanied the Duke of Wellington to their review! I remember being quite provoked with poor Lord Hay, a dashing, merry youth, full of military ardour, whom I knew very well, for his delight at the idea of going into action ... and the first news we had on the 16th was that he and the Duke of Brunswick were killed."—A Sketch, etc., pp. 132, 133.]
[hj] ——tremors of distress.—[MS.]
[hl] Oh that on night so soft, such heavy morn should rise.—[MS.]
[ho] But chiefly——.—[MS.]
[293] {234} [The Hon. Frederick Howard (1785-1815), third son of Frederick, fifth Earl of Carlisle, fell late in the evening of the 18th of June, in a final charge of the left square of the French Guard, in which Vivian brought up Howard's hussars against the French. Neither French infantry nor cavalry gave way, and as the Hanoverians fired but did not charge, a desperate combat ensued, in which Howard fell and many of the 10th were killed.—Waterloo: The Downfall of the First Napoleon, G. Hooper, 1861, p. 236.
Southey, who had visited the field of Waterloo, September, 1815, in his Poet's Pilgrimage (iii. 49), dedicates a pedestrian stanza to his memory—
[294] [Autumn had been beforehand with spring in the work of renovation.
Poet's Pilgrimage, iii. 36.
But the contrast between the continuous action of nature and the doom of the unreturning dead, which does not greatly concern Southey, fills Byron with a fierce desire to sum the price of victory. He flings in the face of the vain-glorious mourners the bitter reality of their abiding loss. It was this prophetic note, "the voice of one crying in the wilderness," which sounded in and through Byron's rhetoric to the men of his own generation.]
[295] [So, too, Coleridge. "Have you never seen a stick broken in the middle, and yet cohering by the rind? The fibres, half of them actually broken and the rest sprained, and, though tough, unsustaining? Oh, many, many are the broken-hearted for those who know what the moral and practical heart of the man is."—Anima Poetæ, 1895, p. 303.]
[296] [According to Lady Blessington (Conversations, p. 176), Byron maintained that the image of the broken mirror had in some mysterious way been suggested by the following quatrain which Curran had once repeated to him:—
But, as M. Darmesteter points out, the true source of inspiration was a passage in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy—"the book," as Byron maintained, "in my opinion most useful to a man who wishes to acquire the reputation of being well-read with the least trouble" (Life, p. 48). Burton is discoursing on injury and long-suffering. "'Tis a Hydra's head contention; the more they strive, the more they may; and as Praxiteles did by his glass [see Cardan, De Consolatione, lib. iii.], when he saw a scurvy face in it, break it in pieces; but for the one he saw, he saw many more as bad in a moment; for one injury done, they provoke another cum fanore, and twenty enemies for one."—Anatomy of Melancholy, 1893, ii. 228. Compare, too, Carew's poem, The Spark, lines 23-26—
Anderson's British Poets, 1793, iii. 703.]
[297] [The "tale" or reckoning of the Psalmist, the span of threescore years and ten, is contrasted with the tale or reckoning of the age of those who fell at Waterloo. A "fleeting span" the Psalmist's; but, reckoning by Waterloo, "more than enough." Waterloo grudges even what the Psalmist allows.]
[ht] On little thoughts with equal firmness fixed.—[MS.]
[298] [Byron seems to have been unable to make up his mind about Napoleon. "It is impossible not to be dazzled and overwhelmed by his character and career," he wrote to Moore (March 17, 1815), when his Héros de Roman, as he called him, had broken open his "captive's cage" and was making victorious progress to the capital. In the Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, which was written in April, 1814, after the first abdication at Fontainebleau, the dominant note is astonishment mingled with contempt. It is the lamentation over a fallen idol. In these stanzas (xxxvi.-xlv.) he bears witness to the man's essential greatness, and, with manifest reference to his own personality and career, attributes his final downfall to the peculiar constitution of his genius and temper. A year later (1817), in the Fourth Canto (stanzas lxxxix.-xcii.), he passes a severe sentence. Napoleon's greatness is swallowed up in weakness. He is a "kind of bastard Cæsar," self-vanquished, the creature and victim of vanity. Finally, in The Age of Bronze, sections iii.-vi., there is a reversion to the same theme, the tragic irony of the rise and fall of the "king of kings, and yet of slaves the slave."
As a schoolboy at Harrow, Byron fought for the preservation of Napoleon's bust, and he was ever ready, in defiance of national feeling and national prejudice, to celebrate him as "the glorious chief;" but when it came to the point, he did not "want him here," victorious over England, and he could not fail to see, with insight quickened by self-knowledge, that greatness and genius possess no charm against littleness and commonness, and that the "glory of the terrestrial" meets with its own reward. The moral is obvious, and as old as history; but herein lay the secret of Byron's potency, that he could remint and issue in fresh splendour the familiar coinage of the world's wit. Moreover, he lived in a great age, when great truths are born again, and appear in a new light.]
[299] [The stanza was written while Napoleon was still under the guardianship of Admiral Sir George Cockburn, and before Sir Hudson Lowe had landed at St. Helena; but complaints were made from the first that imperial honours which were paid to him by his own suite were not accorded by the British authorities.]
[hw] Who tossed thee to and fro till——.—[MS. erased.]
[hx] Which be it wisdom, weakness——.—[MS.]
[id] ——the hate of all below.—[MS.]
[ie] ——on his single head.—[MS.]
[if] ——the wise man's World will be.—[MS.]
[ig] ——for what teems like thee.—[MS.]
[300] [For the archaic use of "battles" for "battalions," compare Macbeth, act v. sc. 4, line 4; and Scott's Lord of the Isles, vi. 10—
[ii] ——are shredless tatters now.—[MS.]
[ik] ——their hearts were far more brave.—[MS.]
[301] [The most usual device is a bleeding heart.]
[302] {246} [Compare Moore's lines, The Meeting of the Waters—
[303] [Compare Lucan's Pharsalia, ix. 969, "Etiam periere ruinæ;" and the lines from Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, xv. 20, quoted in illustration of Canto II. stanza liii.]