Microsoft Word Byron and Scott 1809-1824

96: CHP III, 99, 1-6. 
97: Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, II iii 10 (“cruel-hearted cur”). 
98: Scott’s note: Letter by a Member of the National Assembly (probably forged). 
99: CHP III 81, 3-4. 

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and more effectually,—we devoutly hope the experiment, however hopeful, may not be renewed in our 
time, and that the ‘fixed passion’ which Childe Harold describes as ‘holding his breath,’
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and waiting 
the ‘atoning hour,’ will choke in his purpose ere that hour arrives. Surely the voice of dear-brought 
experience should now at length silence, even in France, the clamour of empirical philosophy. Who 
would listen a moment to the blundering mechanic who should say, ‘I have burned your house down 
ten times in the attempt, but let me once more disturb your old-fashioned chimnies and vents, in order 
to make another trial, and I will pledge myself to succeed in heating it upon the newest and most 
approved principle’? 
The poem proceeds to describe, in a tone of great beauty and feeling, a night-scene on the Lake of 
Geneva; and each natural object, from the evening grasshopper to the stars, ‘the poetry of heaven,’
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suggests the contemplation of the connection between the Creator and his works. The scene is varied 
by the ‘fierce and fair delight’
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of a thunder-storm, described in verse almost as vivid as its lightnings. 
We had marked it for transcript, as one of the most beautiful passages of the poem: but quotation must 
have bounds, and we have been already liberal. But the ‘live thunder leaping among the rattling 
crags’
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—the voice of the mountains, as if shouting to each other—the plashing of the big rain—the 
gleaming of the wide lake, lighted like a phosphoric sea,—present a picture of sublime terror, yet of 
enjoyment, often attempted, but never so well, certainly never better, brought out in poetry. The 
Pilgrim reviews the characters of Gibbon and Voltaire, suggested by their residences on the lake of 
Geneva, and concludes by reverting to the same melancholy tone of feeling with which the poem 
commenced. Childe Harold, though not formally dismissed, glides from our observation; and the poet, 
in his own person, renews the affecting address to his infant daughter:— 
CXV.