I live not in myself, but I become
   Portion of that around me; and to me,
   High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
   Of human cities tortures:  I can see
   Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be
   A link reluctant in a fleshly chain,
   Class’d among creatures, where the soul can flee,
   And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain
Of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain.

These dim revelations of black and lowering thought are overshadowed with a darker hue than sorrow alone could have cast.  A consciousness of sinful blame is evident amid them; and though the fantasies that loom through the mystery, are not so hideous as the guilty reveries in the weird caldron of Manfred’s conscience, still they have an awful resemblance to them.  They are phantoms of the same murky element, and, being more akin to fortitude than despair, prophesy not of hereafter, but oracularly confess suffering.

Manfred himself hath given vent to no finer horror than the oracle that speaks in this magnificent stanza: 

   I have not loved the world, nor the world me;
   I have not flatter’d its rank breath, nor bow’d
   To its idolatries a patient knee—­
   Nor coin’d my cheek to smiles—­nor cried aloud
   In worship of an echo;—­in the crowd
   They could not deem me one of such; I stood
   Among them, but not of them; in a shroud
   Of thoughts which were not of their thoughts, and still could,
Had I not filed my mind, which thus itself subdued.

There are times in life when all men feel their sympathies extinct, and Lord Byron was evidently in that condition, when he penned these remarkable lines; but independently of their striking beauty, the scenery in which they were conceived deserves to be considered with reference to the sentiment that pervades them.  For it was amid the same obscure ravines, pine-tufted precipices and falling waters of the Alps, that he afterward placed the outcast Manfred—­an additional corroboration of the justness of the remarks which I ventured to offer, in adverting to his ruminations in contemplating, while yet a boy, the Malvern hills, as if they were the scenes of his impassioned childhood.  In “the palaces of nature,” he first felt the consciousness of having done some wrong, and when he would infuse into another, albeit in a wilder degree, the feelings he had himself felt, he recalled the images which had ministered to the cogitations of his own contrition.  But I shall have occasion to speak more of this, when I come to consider the nature of the guilt and misery of Manfred.