All my hopes-where'er thou goest

Wither

yet with thee they go.

Every feeling hath been shaken ;

Pride which not a world could bow -

-

Seared in heart - and lone and blighted —

More than this I scarce can die.

SONNET ON CHILLON

This sonnet, one of the noblest of its kind, though prefixed to The Prisoner of Chillon, was in fact written later than that poem as an especial tribute to the Swiss patriot, Bonnivard.

François de Bonnivard was born near Geneva, in 1496, and succeeded in 1510 to the priory of St. Victor, just outside the walls of the city. As an ardent republican, he espoused the cause of Geneva against the Duke of Savoy, on whose entrance into the city in 1519 Bonnivard was seized and imprisoned for two years at Grolée. Again, in 1530, he was captured by robbers and handed over to the Duke, who this time imprisoned him in the famous Castle of Chillon. Here Bonnivard remained for six years, until liberated by the Bernese and Genevese. By this time Geneva had established her freedom, and the patriot was honored and pensioned by the people for whom he had suffered so long. Bonnivard lived in peace through the remainder of his life, wrote a history of Geneva, and, when he died, either in 1570 or in 1571, left his books as a legacy to the city.

Ε

TERNAL Spirit of the chainless Mind!

Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! thou art:

For there thy habitation is the heart

The heart which love of thee alone can bind;

And when thy sons to fetters are consigned
To fetters, and the damp vault's dayless gloom,
Their country conquers with their martyrdom,
And Freedom's fame finds wings on every wind.
Chillon thy prison is a holy place,

And thy sad floor an altar — for 't was trod,
Until his very steps have left a trace

Worn, as if thy cold pavement were a sod,
By Bonnivard! May none those marks efface!
For they appeal from tyranny to God.

THE PRISONER OF CHILLON

Among the great lakes of the world, Geneva is famous for the beauty of its surroundings and the depth and purity of its waters. It was known to the Romans as Lacus Lemannus, whence Byron's favorite name for it, Lake Leman."

At the eastern end of Lake Geneva, on an isolated rock at the edge of the water, rises the picturesque building known as the Castle of Chillon, its walls washed by the waters of the lake, which here attain a depth of nearly one thousand feet. The foundations of the castle date from a very early period; though as it stands, with its one central tower surrounded by towers either semicircular or square, it is essentially of the thirteenth century. In the eighteenth century it was used as a state prison, and afterwards as an arsenal. In this building, rendered famous by his genius, Byron lays the scene of his Prisoner of Chillon. The hero of the poem is an entirely fictitious personage, whose dreadful captivity bears little resemblance to that of Bonnivard, although the latter is often and wrongly supposed to be the hero. But Byron himself says in the "advertisement" prefixed to The Prisoner of Chillon: "When this poem was composed I was not sufficiently aware of the history of Bonnivard, or I should have endeavoured to dignify the subject by an attempt to celebrate his courage and his virtues."

But, although the whole story is purely imaginary, we must allow the poem - in addition to its high poetic truth a certain measure of historical probability, when we remember the deeds done in the days of religious intolerance and persecution, before men had learned to acknowledge the freedom of the individual conscience.

Byron wrote The Prisoner of Chillon in two days - June 26 and 27 1816, while detained by bad weather at the village of Ouchy, near

Lausanne. In dignity, of theme and in descriptive power it far surpasses any of the narrative poems that preceded it. The hopeless captivity, the deaths of the two young brothers, the prisoner's grief, his unconsciousness of time and space in

A sea of stagnant idleness,

Blind, boundless, mute, and motionless;

the carol of the bird arousing him from his despair, his contentment with captivity, and at last — the crown of his desolation - his regaining his freedom with a sigh, all these are scenes that could be adequately pictured only by the hand of a great master.

MY

I

Y hair is grey, but not with years,
Nor grew it white

In a single night,

As men's have grown from sudden fears:

My limbs are bowed, though not with toil,
But rusted with a vile repose,

For they have been a dungeon's spoil,
And mine has been the fate of those

To whom the goodly earth and air
Are banned and barred-forbidden fare;
But this was for my father's faith

I suffered chains and courted death;
That father perished at the stake
For tenets he would not forsake;
And for the same his lineal race
In darkness found a dwelling-place;
We were seven who now are one,
Six in youth and one in age,
Finished as they had begun,

Proud of Persecution's rage;

One in fire, and two in field,

Their belief with blood have sealed,
Dying as their father died,

For the God their foes denied ;

IO

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