The seven Spirits then sing this chorus:

Earth, ocean, air, night, mountains, winds, thy star,
Are at thy beck and bidding, Child of Clay!
Before thee at thy quest their spirits are-

What wouldst thou with us, son of mortals-say?

Manfred asks them to bestow upon him forgetfulness of what is past, and they reply that this is beyond their power. They say that he may die if he will. He asks if death will bring forgetfulness, but their answer now is not more satisfactory than before. Then he commands them to appear before him in a human shape; and one of them, the Spirit of his natal Star, puts on the form of a beautiful woman, in whom Manfred recognises a person connected with the history of his crime and his misery. He falls senseless, and the scene closes.

The next scene is in the mountain of the Jungfrau, and the effect of the breaking day upon that romantic scenery is accurately expressed in the following beautiful soliloquy of Manfred:

My mother Earth!

And thou fresh-breaking Day! and you, ye mountains!
Why are ye beautiful? I cannot love ye.
And thou, the bright eye of the universe-
That openest over all, and unto all
Art a delight-thou shinest not on my heart.
And you, ye crags, upon whose extreme edge
I stand, and on the torrent's brink beneath
Behold the tall pines dwindled as to shrubs
In dizziness of distance; when a leap,
A stir, a motion, even a breath, would bring
My breast upon its rocky bosom's bed,
To rest for ever-wherefore do I pause ?
I feel the impulse-yet I do not plunge;
I see the peril-yet do not recede;
And my brain reels-and yet my foot is firm:
There is a power upon me which withholds,
And makes it my fatality to live;
If it be life to wear within myself
This barrenness of spirit, and to be
My own soul's sepulchre, for I have ceased
To justify my deeds unto myself-
The last infirmity of evil.

The whole of this scene is exquisitely beautiful; and the manner in which the objects of nature work upon the heart of the mysterious being, who has lost all community with his fellow-men, is in the highest degree skilful.

An eagle passes over his head, and elicits from him the following apostrophe :

Thou winged and cloud cleaving minister,
Whose happy flight is highest into heaven,
Well may'st thou swoop so near me-I should be
Thy prey, and gorge thy eaglets; thou art gone
Where the eye cannot follow thee; but thine
Yet pierces downward, onward, or above,
With a pervading vision.-Beautiful!
How beautiful is all this visible world!
How glorious in its action and itself!
But we, who name ourselves its sovereigns, we,
Half dust, half deity, alike unfit

To sink or soar, with our mixed essence make
A conflict of its elements, and breathe
The breath of degradation and of pride,
Contending with low wants and lofty will
Till our mortality predominates,

And men are-what they name not to themselves.
And trust not to each other.

The effect of a simple melody, heard in the distance from a shepherd's pipe-a sound which never failed to stir man's heart to gentle and kind feelings-is thus described as Manfred continues his soliloquy:

- Hark! the note,

The natural music of the mountain reed-
For here the patriarchal days are not

A pastoral fable-pipes in the liberal air,

Mixed with the sweet bells of the sauntering herd.
My soul would drink these echoes.-Oh, that I were
The viewless spirit of a lovely sound,

A living voice, a breathing harmony,
A bodiless enjoyment-born and dying
With the blest tone which made me!

The recollection of his misery, the consequence of his own vice, now rushes upon his mind, and he meditates his own destruction:

To be thus

Grey-haired with anguish, like these blasted pines
Wrecks of a single winter, barkless, branchless,
A blighted trunk upon a cursed root
Which but supplies a feeling to decay-
And to be thus, eternally but thus,

Having been otherwise! Now furrowed o'er
With wrinkles, ploughed by moments, not by years;
And hours-all tortured into ages-hours
Which I outlive!-Ye toppling crags of ice!
Ye avalanches, whom a breath draws down
In mountainous o'erwhelming, come and crush me!
I hear ye momently above, beneath,

Crash with a frequent conflict; but ye pass,
And only fall on things which still would live;
On the young flourishing forest, or the hut

And hamlet of the harmless villager.

Man. The mists boil up around the glaciers; clouds
Rise curling fast beneath me, white and sulphury,
Like foam from the roused ocean of deep hell,
Whose every wave breaks on a living shore,
Heaped with the damned, like pebbles. I am giddy.

He resolves to leap from the rock on which he stands, and to seek the forgetfulness, in which alone he can find-not happiness, but a respite from his misery, by dashing himself to atoms on the lower crags. As he is about to take this mad leap, a chamois-hunter, whom the wildness of his gestures has attracted, approaches him, and seizes his arm in time to prevent his destruction. Manfred, overcome by his feelings, suffers his preserver to lead him to his chalêt.

It has been objected that the introduction of this chamois-hunter, and Manfred's quietly accompanying him to his cottage, are circumstances too trivial in themselves for the purpose of the drama, and, as regards the actores fabulæ, not natural. The objection is well enough founded; but let the critic remember that, while nothing is more easy than to bring a character on the stage, there is a world of trouble very often in getting him off again. Poor Mr. Puff, in the 'Critic,' is dreadfully perplexed when he discovers that his actors cannot go off kneeling.' Lord Byron had by no means done with his Manfred at this part of the play-he could not afford to let him kill himself, and, when it comes to the point of saving a man's life, whether a chamoishunter or the Humane Society's drags are resorted to is no matter, provided the point is but gained.

Manfred's narrow escape does not deter him from resorting once again to the unhallowed agents, by his intercourse with whom he has destroyed his happiness.

In the second act a scene is introduced, where he conjures up the Witch of the Alps; and a dialogue ensues, which describes more fully his character, and the unutterable crime which has left its dark shadow upon his heart.

This mystery, as far as it can be unravelled, seems to be that Manfred had conceived an insane passion for his sister Astarte, and that the consequences of their mutual and unnatural guilt had driven her to the commission of suicide. The anguish of this fatal catastrophe induces Manfred to seek the spirits of the lower world at the peril of his own soul.

Lord Byron has mastered many of the difficulties which a story of this description is filled with; but it is still so obscure, so much a subject which must be shrouded in darkness, that, at the best, we can only guess that such is its meaning. The scene with the Witch of the Alps contains some of the most beautiful and impassioned poetry, not only in the tragedy, but even in the whole range of his works.

Without making the intervention of the supernatural agency in any degree horrid, he has filled it with beauty and force, and has given it a melancholy pathos which could be drawn only from the rich and original stores of his own sensitive mind. His Witch is equal to the brightest conceptions of the Greek or any other fabulists:

(Manfred takes some of the water into the palm of his hand, and flings it in the air, muttering the adjuration. After a pause, the Witch of the Alps rises beneath the arch of the sunbeam of the torrent.)

Man. Beautiful Spirit! with thy hair of light,

And dazzling eyes of glory, in whose form
The charms of Earth's least-mortal daughters grow
To an unearthly stature, in an essence

Of purer elements; while the hues of youth-
Carnationed like a sleeping infant's cheek,
Rocked by the beating of her mother's heart
Or the rose tints, which summer's twilight leaves
Upon the lofty glacier's virgin snow,
The blush of earth embracing with her heaven-
Tinge thy celestial aspect, and make tame

The beauties of the sunbow which bends o'er thee.

After this exordium, which is equally ingenious in the ideas it contains, and happy in the mode by which they are expressed, the Witch inquires of Manfred what he would ask of her. He replies, merely to gaze on her beauty. The face of earth, he says, has maddened him, and he seeks, for the purpose of stilling the restlessness of his soul, to penetrate the abodes of those spirits who rule the earth. She asks him again what he seeks; and at length, overcoming the reluctance he feels to repeat the story of his misery, he, at the persuasion of the Witch, goes on to describe if that may be called a description that consists only of dark hints-the events of his life. He confesses the faults into which his pride (that sin by which the angels fell) has led him, his intercourse with forbidden powers, and his horrid crime.

He begins by describing the practices of his youth, and the temper of his mind, which has always been unlike that of ordinary men. The motive of his actions and the object of his ambition were different from those by which the common race of men are governed. He felt like a stranger among his fellows; and, though he was the very creature of passion and feeling, his were always different passions and different feelings from those of others. He had no sympathies with the animated dust about him; and, excepting for one person-but as he comes to this point he checks himself, and turns to a different subject. It was his delight in youth, he says, to roam the wilderness, to climb the rock, and to breathe the difficult air of the iced mountain-top,' where never the wing of bird or insect brushed over the barren granite. At other times he would plunge into the torrent, or breast the furious waves of the rapid rivers or the restless sea.

In all this may be traced some of the wayward habits of the author's boyhood, and here, as well as in the more serious actions of his life, may be found the proof that the impressions which those habits made upon him were never eradicated. After pursuing the same strain somewhat further, he says: