There are times in life when all men feel their sympathies extinct, and Lord Byron was evidently in that condition, when he penned these remarkable lines; but independently of their striking beauty, the scenery in which they were conceived deserves to be considered with reference to the sentiment that pervades them.  For it was amid the same obscure ravines, pine-tufted precipices and falling waters of the Alps, that he afterward placed the outcast Manfred—an additional corroboration of the justness of the remarks which I ventured to offer, in adverting to his ruminations in contemplating, while yet a boy, the Malvern hills, as if they were the scenes of his impassioned childhood.  In “the palaces of nature,” he first felt the consciousness of having done some wrong, and when he would infuse into another, albeit in a wilder degree, the feelings he had himself felt, he recalled the images which had ministered to the cogitations of his own contrition.  But I shall have occasion to speak more of this, when I come to consider the nature of the guilt and misery of Manfred.

That Manfred is the greatest of Byron’s works will probably not be disputed.  It has more than the fatal mysticism of Macbeth, with the satanic grandeur of the Paradise Lost, and the hero is placed in circumstances, and amid scenes, which accord with the stupendous features of his preternatural character.  How then, it may be asked, does this moral phantom, that has never been, bear any resemblance to the poet himself?  Must not, in this instance, the hypothesis which assigns to Byron’s heroes his own sentiments and feelings be abandoned?  I think not.  In noticing the deep and solemn reflections with which he was affected in ascending the Rhine, and which he has embodied in the third canto of Childe Harold, I have already pointed out a similarity in the tenour of the thoughts to those of Manfred, as well as the striking acknowledgment of the “filed” mind.  There is, moreover, in the drama, the same distaste of the world which Byron himself expressed when cogitating on the desolation of his hearth, and the same contempt of the insufficiency of his genius and renown to mitigate contrition—all in strange harmony with the same magnificent objects of sight.  Is not the opening soliloquy of Manfred the very echo of the reflections on the Rhine?

My slumbers—if I slumber—are not sleep,
But a continuance of enduring thought,
Which then I can resist not; in my heart
There is a vigil, and these eyes but close
To look within—and yet I live and bear
The aspect and the form of breathing man.

But the following is more impressive: it is the very phrase he would himself have employed to have spoken of the consequences of his fatal marriage: