Amidst other intellectual pursuits in which happiness has been sought, the career of the poet may next be adverted to. His delights lie in the cultivation of a creative imagination and in the enjoyment of those pleasures which can only be tested by a mind of a refined order and delicate structure. When the poet's gifts have been devoted to the glory of God, they have proved to be eminently profitable and delightful. When cultivated in an irreligious and worldly spirit, however, experience has shown by more than one painful instance that a highly gifted bard may be a miserable man. The life of Savage, the friend of Johnson, will be familiar to the student of English literature. The course of Chatterton is not less mournful. Full of youthful promise, he repaired to London to commence, as he expected, a successful literary career. "What a glorious prospect awaits me!" he wrote on his arrival; yet within a few months he was buried as a common pauper from Shoe Lane workhouse. Equally sad associations are connected with the poet Burns. "Save me from the horrors of a jail," were almost his last words. "It will be some time," he wrote in his final illness, "before I tune my lyre again. I have of late only known existence by the pressure of the heavy hand of sickness and have counted time by the repercussions of pain. I close my eyes in misery, and open them without hope. Pale, emaciated and feeble, you would not know me if you saw me; and my spirits fled—fled!”
In the biography of the poet Campbell, who had in early youth sung "The Pleasures of Hope," a touching instance occurs of the emptiness of poetic fame. In the evening of life, the poet thus spoke to a circle of friends: "I am alone in the world. My wife and the child of my hopes are dead. My only surviving child is consigned to a living tomb" (he was the inmate of a lunatic asylum). "My old friends, brothers and sisters are dead—all but one, and she too is dying. My last hopes are blighted. As for fame it is a bubble that must soon burst. Earned for others, shared with others, it was sweet; but at my age, to my own solitary experience it is bitter. Left in my chamber alone with myself, is it wonderful my philosophy at times takes fright, that I rush into company; resort to that which blunts but heals no pang; and then, sick of the world, and dissatisfied with myself, shrink back into solitude?”
As a far more striking instance, however, of the vanity of poetical genius and the emptiness of mere worldly fame, when ennobled by no divine aim or purpose, we select, as the type, LORD BYRON, or The Poet.
Upon this remarkable man were heaped many of those gifts of nature and of fortune which are by the world so highly prized. He was by birth noble, tracing his descent from a line of ancestors which stretched back to a remote period of English history. Although not wealthy, he was left in possession of an income which, to a well-regulated mind, would have secured independence. His manners, when he wished to please, are stated to have been singularly winning and attractive. His smile disarmed opposition, and invited friendship. His external appearance harmonized with the order of his mind. He not only was, but looked, the poet. The pencil of the artist and the chisel of the sculptor were alike employed to delineate his countenance as a model of classic grace. The talents entrusted to his stewardship were great; how melancholy, in surveying his short career, to observe their misapplication! And how different would have been the result had they been guided by the wisdom that is from above instead of that which "is earthly, sensual, devilish!”
His poetical genius was of a high class, capable of describing external nature and the play of human passions in a manner which stirred the deepest emotions of the heart. Byron early felt within himself aspirations after literary eminence. When a mere youth, he wrote—
“The desire in my bosom for fame
Bids me live but to hope for posterity's praise:
Could I soar with the phoenix, on ashes of flame,
With it I would wish to expire in the blaze.”
These desires were speedily gratified. After a passing disappointment caused by the failure of some minor poetical effusions, he published his first great poem. "The effect of it," says a writer, "was electric. His fame had not to wait for any of the ordinary gradations but seemed to spring up, like the palace of a fairy tale, in a single night." His work became the theme of every tongue. At his door many of the leading men of the day presented themselves. From morning till night the most flattering testimonies of success crowded his table. "He found himself," says Mr. Macaulay, "on the highest pinnacle of literary fame. There is scarcely an instance in history of so sudden a rise to so dizzy an eminence. Everything that could stimulate, everything that could gratify the strongest propensities of our nature, were at once offered to him: the gaze of a hundred drawing-rooms, the acclamations of the whole nation, and the applause of applauded men." "In place of the desert," continues his biographer, "which London had been to him a few weeks before, he not only saw the whole splendid interior of high life thrown open to him, but found himself the most distinguished object among its illustrious crowds." A short time before the publication of his poem, Byron had taken his seat amidst the hereditary legislators of his country. With genius, with popularity and with rank, how brilliant the prospect which now lay before him! Yet it proved but the deception of the mirage.
In that with which, above all other points, true happiness is so essentially connected—Christian principle—his mind was singularly deficient; it had been darkened by skepticism. When a youth, some passing religious convictions appear to have agitated him, for he wrote at that season a poem containing the following lines:
“Father of light, on Thee I call;
Thou seest my soul is dark within;
Thou, who canst mark the sparrow's fall,
Avert from me the death of sin.”
If spiritual anxiety did for a moment cross his mind, it was soon obliterated by the irregularity of his moral conduct. The memorials of his early years are full of those records of wasted seasons of usefulness and squandered talents which lay up such a store of reproach for afterlife. "The average hour of rising," says one of his companions at Newstead Abbey, "was one o'clock. It was two before breakfast was concluded." Frivolous amusements consumed the remaining hours until the company at seven sat down to an entertainment which was prolonged till two or three in the morning. The finest wines were abundantly supplied, a cup, fashioned out of a human skull, forming an unhallowed chalice out of which the guests were occasionally expected to drink. The result of this life was such as might have been anticipated— inward dissatisfaction. To use the poet's own language—
“He felt the fullness of saiety,”
and he quitted his native shores for foreign travel in the hope of supplying his weary spirit with fresh excitement, but all in vain. Though he carried with him a genius deeply imbued with poetical power, he returned to England chagrined and sick at heart. When his travels were concluded, he thus wrote: "Embarrassed in my private affairs, indifferent to public, solitary, and without the wish to be social, I am returning home without a hope and almost without a desire.”
Fresh literary triumphs failed to secure the happiness which he sought, nor was he more successful in finding it in a marriage which he soon afterward contracted. He saw, to use his own language, his household gods shivered around him. Nine executions for debt entered his dwelling within a twelvemonth, and at the end of that period a separation ensued between his wife and himself. Retiring abroad, he plunged afresh in streams of sinful pleasure. His life became a miserable animal existence— the source of wretchedness to himself. He was, indeed, sick of it. "If I were to live over again," he writes, "I do not know what I would change in my life, except not to have lived at all." Similar sentiments were expressed in his poetry:
“Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen,
Count o'er the days from anguish free;
And know, whatever thou hast been,
'Tis something better not to be.”
The whole of his poetry, indeed, continued to bear the impress of his morbid spirit. "Never had any writer," says a critic, "so vast a command of the whole eloquence of scorn, misanthropy, and despair. That Marah was never dry. No heart could sweeten, no drafts exhaust, its perennial waters of bitterness. From maniac laughter to piercing lamentation, there was not a single note of human anguish of which he was not master. He always described himself as a man whose capacity for happiness was gone and could not be restored." Restless and dissatisfied, he pursued new objects, and betook himself to a visionary scheme for the political regeneration of Greece—a country which had attracted his poetical sympathies. Fresh disappointments awaited him in this scene of action, and his heart's aspirations after enjoyment were again blasted. On the last birthday which he was destined to see, he thus described in touching lines his own lonely and miserable condition:
“My days are in the yellow leaf,
The flowers and fruits of love are gone;
The worm, the canker, and the grief
Are mine alone.
The fire that in my bosom plays
Is lone as some volcanic isle;
No torch is kindled at its blaze,
A funeral pile.”
The life of the poet was now, however, drawing to a close. Shortly after composing these verses he was arrested by the hand of disease, and his illness terminated fatally. The death-bed of this highly gifted man was a painful spectacle. "I had never before felt," says an eye-witness of it, "as I felt that evening. There was the gifted Lord Byron, who had been the object of universal attention, who had even as a youth been intoxicated with the idolatry of men, gradually expiring and almost forsaken without even the consolation of breathing out his last sigh in the arms of some dear friend. His habitation was weather-tight, but that was all the comfort his deplorable room afforded him." No gleam of joy, of peace, or hope, rose upon that melancholy scene; no prayer for forgiveness ascended. The Divine Redeemer was but once mentioned and then only in an exclamation wrung forth by pain. The dying poet murmured some broken and inarticulate sentences in which occurred the names of his wife and child, and falling into a troubled slumber, he soon afterward died:
“His high aims abandoned—his good acts undone—
Aweary of all that is under the sun.”
Such was the termination of the Poet's career. The world and the glory thereof had been his; but, unsanctified and unblessed by God, all his rich intellectual enjoyments had proved illusive as the mirage.
“Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes: but know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment" (Eccl. 11:99Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes: but know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment. (Ecclesiastes 11:9)).