A man of loneliness and mystery,
Scarce seen to smile, and seldom heard to sigh;
Robust, but not Herculean, to the sight,
No giant frame sets forth his common height;
Yet in the whole, who paused to look again
Saw more than marks the crowd of vulgar men:
They gaze and marvel how, and still confess
That thus it is, but why they cannot guess.
Sun-burnt his cheek, his forehead high and pale,
The sable curls in wild profusion veil.
And oft perforce his rising lip reveals
The haughtier thought it curbs, but scarce conceals:
Though smooth his voice, and calm his general mien,
Still seems there something he would not have seen.
His features’ deepening lines and varying hue
At times attracted, yet perplex’d the view,
As if within that murkiness of mind
Work’d feelings fearful, and yet undefined:
Such might he be that none could truly tell,
Too close inquiry his stern glance could quell.
There breathed but few whose aspect could defy
The full encounter of his searching eye;
He had the skill, when cunning gaze to seek
To probe his heart and watch his changing cheek,
At once the observer’s purpose to espy,
And on himself roll back his scrutiny,
Lest he to Conrad rather should betray
Some secret thought, than drag that chief’s to day.

There was a laughing devil in his sneer
That raised emotions both of rage and fear;
And where his frown of hatred darkly fell
Hope withering fled, and mercy sigh’d, farewell.

It will be allowed that, in this portrait, some of the darker features and harsher lineaments of Byron himself are very evident, but with a more fixed sternness than belonged to him; for it was only by fits that he could put on such severity.  Conrad is, however, a higher creation than any which he had previously described.  Instead of the listlessness of Childe Harold, he is active and enterprising; such as the noble pilgrim would have been, but for the satiety which had relaxed his energies.  There is also about him a solemnity different from the animation of the Giaour—a penitential despair arising from a cause undisclosed.  The Giaour, though wounded and fettered, and laid in a dungeon, would not have felt as Conrad is supposed to feel in that situation.  The following bold and terrific verses, descriptive of the maelstrom agitations of remorse, could not have been appropriately applied to the despair of grief, the predominant source of emotion in The Giaour.

There is a war, a chaos of the mind
When all its elements convulsed combined,
Lie dark and jarring with perturbed force,
And gnashing with impenitent remorse.
That juggling fiend who never spake before,
But cries, “I warn’d thee,” when the deed is o’er;
Vain voice, the spirit burning, but unbent,
May writhe, rebel—the weak alone repent.