LESSON XCVII.

THE DYING GLADIATOR.

Described in the figure of Vision.-BYRON.

[GEORGE GORDON BYRON (Lord Byron), who occupies a foremost rank among English poets, was born at Dover, England, in 1788. He died at Missolonghi, Greece, in 1824, at the early age of thirty-seven.-While most of his poems exhibit a wonderful power and splendor of language, and often portray the noblest virtues, some of them show a moral depravity which no merit of language can redeem. Like Byron's character, his poems vacillate between the extremes of good and evil.]

1. I SEE before me the gladiator lie`:

He leans upon his hand': his manly brow
Consents to death', but conquers agony';
And his drooped head sinks gradually low;
And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow
From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one,

Like the first of a thunder-shower; and now

The arena swims around him—he is gone, [who won. Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hailed the wretch

2. He heard it, but he heeded not: his eyes

away: .

Were with his heart, and that was far
He recked not of the life he lost, nor prize,
But where his rude hut by the Danube lay;
There were his young barbarians all at play,
There was their Dacian mother; he, their sire,
Butchered to make a Roman holiday:

All this rushed with his blood. Shall he expire, And unavenged? Arise, ye Goths, and glut your ire.

3. The first of the above two verses is a description of what has been so well represented in one of the masterpieces of ancient sculpture, called The Dying Gladiator—a representation in which the unconscious marble has given immortality to the pangs of death. The same scene might also have been represented in painting, so that, in either case, we could see, in fancy, the dying man, as, leaning upon his hand, he "consents to death, but conquers agony.' 4. But neither the marble nor the canvas could ever have

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called up the scene depicted with such touching pathos in the second verse, so as to carry us away, with the thoughts of the dying man, to his rude home on the distant Danube. It required the poet of passion to turn the marble into man, and endow it with human affections. Herein is exemplified a power which the poetry of nature possesses, far beyond that of the chisel of the sculptor or the pencil of the artist. -Adapted from MONTGOMERY.

LESSON XCVIII. ·

MACBETH'S VISION.

Soliloquy and Personification.-Shakspeare's Macbeth, Act II., Sc. 1. 1. DURING the reign of Duncan the Meek, king of Scotland, there lived a powerful thane, or lord, named Macbeth. The wicked wife of Macbeth plotted the murder of the king, and, having supplied the guards with wine, till they were intoxicated, she placed a dagger in her husband's hand, and urged him to stab the sleeping Duncan.

2. Groping his way through the darkness, to the bed of his victim, with the murderous weapon in his hand, he thought he saw another dagger in the air, with the handle toward him, and the blade smeared with blood; but when he tried to grasp it it was nothing but an airy phantasm, like most if not all visions

"A false creation,

Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain."

During the hesitation caused by this apparition, Shakspeare represents Macbeth as soliloquizing thus:

[thee:Come, let me clutch

3. Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand?
I have thee not; and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling, as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind; a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which I now draw.

4. Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going; And such an instrument I was to use.

5.

Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,
Or else worth all the rest: I see thee still;

And on thy blade, and dudgeon, gouts of blood,
Which was not so before.-There's no such thing:
It is the bloody business, which informs

Thus to mine eyes.-Now o'er the one half world
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtained sleep; now witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hěcăte's offerings; and withered murder,
Alarumed by his sentinel, the wolf,

Whose howl's his watch, thus, with his stealthy pace,
With Tarquin's ravishing strides, toward his design
Moves like a ghost.

Thou sure and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
The very stones prate of my whereabout,
And take the present horror from the time,

Which now suits with it.-Whiles I threat, he lives;
Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.

I go, and it is done; the bell invites me. [A bell rings.
Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell

That summons thee to heaven, or to hell.

6. Overcoming his fear, he entered the king's apartment, and dispatched him with a single stroke of his dagger. Macbeth returned to his waiting and guilty wife, who took the bloody weapon, and placed it in the room of the king's servants where they slept, having first smeared their faces with the blood, that the murder might be laid to their charge.

7. When morning dawned, and the murder was discovered, Macbeth affected great grief, but so managed as to be proclaimed king of Scotland. But the usurper's reign was short, for he was slain by Macduff; and Malcolm, Duncan's son and Scotland's lawful king, ascended the throne, amid the acclamations of the nobles and people.

MODIFICATIONS OF VISION.

I. THE PROGRESS OF MIND.

BORN into the world in ignorance, man is impelled by imperious instinct to know. "Seek," whispers a voice in his soul," and thou shalt find." He seeks, he observes, he inquires. He ascends the mountain of knowledge-rugged, precipitous; he climbs with difficulty from crag to crag. On the topmost peak, in the clear evening of an intellectual life, he beholds, not the sterile boundaries of a universe explored, but an ocean of knowledge yet to be traversed, a Pacific of truth stretching on and on into the deeps of eternity.

II. NEWTON'S ATTAINMENTS.

Newton declared, a short time before his death, "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a child playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a pebble, or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

CHARACTER OF REPETITION.

[Analysis.-1. Why repetition is generally to be avoided.-2. Cases in which it may be used with good effect. Example.-3. Beautiful examples of repetition in Virgil.-4. Example from "Pierpont's Airs of Palestine."-5. Description of the Bible.-6, 7. A beautiful example of this figure in one of Cicero's Orations.-8, 9, 10. A pleasant example of repetition from Milton.-11, 12. An example from Herbert Spencer.-13, 14, 15. An example from Daniel Webster.]

1. As a general rule of composition, a repetition of the same words, or of the same meaning in different words, is to be avoided, as tending to weaken the impression; and especially is the fault of redundancy an unpardonable one in narration, and in didactic writings, the great ornament of which is a concise and comprehensive style".

2. But there are cases, nevertheless, in which repetition may be used with good effect, to give a dramatic air of truth to some theme of great magnitude, on which both author and reader love to dwell. Thus David, in his lament over Absalom, in the earnestness of his soul gives utterance to his grief, using again and again nearly the same words; and our sympathy fondly indulges him in the repetition. "Oh my son Absalom! my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, oh Absalom, my son, my son !"

3. Virgil uses this figure with much beauty, in the lamentation of Orpheus for his beloved Eu ryd'i ce:

"Thee', his loved wife, along the lonely shores;
Thee', his loved' wife', his mournful song deplores;
Thee', when the rising morning gives the light,
Thee', when the world was overspread with night"."