The Montgomery advertiser., 1902-04-27
FOR LOVERS OF BEST VERSE
Venice.
By Lord Byron.

By Lord Byron, l stood in Venice. on the Bridge of SiGhs. A palace and prison on each hand; l saw from out the wave her structures As from the stroke of the enchanter'a [
 wand
 A thousand years their cloudy wings Around me, and a dying glory smiles
 Der the far times, when many sub
 ject land
 Looked to the winged lions marble piles. Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles.
 In Venice Tasso's echoes are no more. And silent rows the songless gondolier; Her palaces are crumbling to the shore. And music meets not always now the Those days are gone-but beauty still
 is here.
 States fall, arts fade. but nature doth Nor yet forget how Venice once was The pleasant place of all festivity. The revel of the earth. the masque of
 Italy.
 But unto us she hath a spell beyond
 Her name in story and her long array Of mighty shadows, whose dim forms despond
 Above the dogeless city's vanishd sway
 
 With the Rialto: Shylock and the Moor, And Pierre, cannot be swept or worn away
 The keystones of the arch! though all For us repeopled were the solitary shore The Poet.
 Washington Times.
 The romantic interest that has centered about George Gordon Noel. Lord Byron. sa 1.t ,,t1 AA NkA A~tA -f !. and partly to the extraordinary character of the man himself. His life was a re- markable series of achievements and ad- ventures, romances and scandals. He was born on January 2S. 17ss. of an old English family, and at 10 years of age he succeeded to the title of his granduncfe. the fifth Lord Byron. and to the ances- tral estate of Newstead Abbey.
 From childhood Byron displayed bril- liant and precocious emotional genius While schoolboy at Eton he formed a passionate attachment for Miss Cha worth. which was not returned. After two years at Cambridge, which he left without taking degree. he began the Harolds Pilgrimage" The success of the poem when 1t was published in 1911 was such that Byron declared that The awoke one morning and found himself famous" His unhappy marriage to Miss Anna Milbanke followed, and in 1916 Byron left England, never to return. He spent four years in Italy-a period of reckless liv- ing and of prolific literary work. In 1923. having resolved to join the forces of the Greeks. then in revolt against Turkey. he crossed the Adriatic. to die. few months later. at the siege of Missolonghi. April 19, 1924
 With Shelley and Keats. Byron was one of the trio of great English poets who appeared In the second decade of the nineteenth century; and in poetic power, in his influence upon his contemporaries and as a permanent force in literature he was distinctly the greatest of the three. While Wadsworth, Colerldge, and Southey were working upon independent lines of their own Byron and his colleagues sup planted the ballad poetry of Scott with something much more Intense, human and dramatic.
 Byron sshort life--for he died at 36- was one of ,feverishly rapid production. He wrote with extraordinary facility and a wonderful command of diction; but his forceful and fiery verses do not possess the finish of a Tennyson or an Austin Dobson. They are often a little rough in meter and sometimes trifle obscure in expression.