Night after night for years
He hath pursued long vigils in this tower
Without a witness.—I have been within it—
So have we all been ofttimes; but from it,
Or its contents, it were impossible
To draw conclusions absolute of aught
His studies tend to.—To be sure there is
One chamber where none enter—. . .
Count Manfred was, as now, within his tower:
How occupied—we know not—but with him,
The sole companion of his wanderings
And watchings—her—whom of all earthly things
That liv’d, the only thing he seem’d to love.

With admirable taste, and its thrilling augmentation of the horror, the poet leaves the deed which was done in that unapproachable chamber undivulged, while we are darkly taught, that within it lie the relics or the ashes of the “one without a tomb.”

2  The sacrifice of Antinous by the emperor Adrian is supposed to have been a sacrifice of that kind.  Dion Cassius says, that Adrian, who had applied himself to the study of magic, being deceived by the principles of that black Egyptian art into a belief that he would be rendered immortal by a voluntary human sacrifice to the infernal gods, accepted the offer which Antinous made of himself.

I have somewhere met with a commentary on this to the following effect:

The Christian religion, in the time of Adrian, was rapidly spreading throughout the empire, and the doctrine of gaining eternal life by the expiatory offering was openly preached.  The Egyptian priests, who pretended to be in possession of all knowledge, affected to be acquainted with this mystery also.  The emperor was, by his taste and his vices, attached to the old religion; but he trembled at the truths disclosed by the revelation; and in this state of apprehension, his thirst of knowledge and his fears led him to consult the priests of Osiris and Isis; and they impressed him with a notion that the infernal deities would be appeased by the sacrifice of a human being dear to him, and who loved him so entirely as to lay down his life for him.  Antinous, moved by the anxiety of his imperial master, when all others had refused, consented to sacrifice himself; and it was for this devotion that Adrian caused his memory to be hallowed with religious rites.

CHAPTER XXXIII

Table of Contents

State of Byron in Switzerland—He goes to Venice—The fourth Canto of “Childe Harold”—Rumination on his own Condition—Beppo—Lament of Tasso—Curious Example of Byron’s metaphysical Love

The situation of Lord Byron in Switzerland was comfortless.  He found that “the montain palaces of Nature” afforded no asylum to a haunted heart; he was ill at ease with himself, even dissatisfied that the world had not done him enough of wrong to justify his misanthropy.