Astarte

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ASTARTE CHAPTER I . BYRON CHARACTERISTICS Ich leb und weisz nicht wie lang ich sterb und weisz nicht wann ich fahr und weisz nicht wohin mich wundert dasz ich frohlich bin. Inscription on a house at Partenkirchen, Bavaria. According to tradition, originally written by Maximilian I on a wall of the Castle...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ASTARTE CHAPTER I . BYRON CHARACTERISTICS Ich leb und weisz nicht wie lang ich sterb und weisz nicht wann ich fahr und weisz nicht wohin mich wundert dasz ich frohlich bin. Inscription on a house at Partenkirchen, Bavaria. According to tradition, originally written by Maximilian I on a wall of the Castle of Tratzberg, Tirol. IT will not be irrelevant to begin the record of events with, the observation that never, perhaps, has constitutional melancholy been more closely allied to, though hidden under, levity and wit, than in the mysterious being who died at Missolonghi on Easter Monday, 1824. His merriment was foam that floated on the waters of bitterness. z Laughter and profound sadness flow together all through the course of his life, and were mingled even in the melancholy circumstances that have to be noticed in these pages. When he and Augusta were snowed up together at Newstead in January, 1814, they made the old ruinousspaces resound with their laughter, but a deep abiding sadness always filled his heart?in common with another incomplete man of action, Mazzini?who as a poet and a thinker was not without affinity to Byron. They both, with a few exceptions, despised the present generation. l Mazzini found his only consolation amidst the selfishness and stupidity, the deformities and disasters of humanity of the present, in visions and prophecies of restoration to a lost ideal in an immeasurably remote future. Byron saw in his imagination an incommensurable void gaping beneath overhanging ledges upon which he was perched, with no possible descent. Bulging precipices drop beneath him to uplands glowing in the tints of June. A sunny mirage from the chasm between his feet becomes the vision of the optimist dreamer, but Byron well knows that no liv...