I remembered the passage in Henry the Sixth where he says that he hates “the loud applause and aves vehement” of the many, and of his little esteem for those who “affect” such, and I followed up that silent recollection by saying:
“And, after all, Milton, Pope, Byron, Wordsworth, Keats, lie far away from that edifice; also, I might add, one greater than any of them—yourself.”
“Dear old Stratford-on-Avon!” he said, as though he were musing rather than addressing himself to me. “I am well content to be sepulchred there. How I loved it! How I love it still! And how much I owed to it! My works, such as they are, have in your ingenious age been attributed to one much more nobly born, more highly educated, more deeply read, more erudite, than I. They who started, and those who have accepted, that theory, little understand that no such man could have written them. Whatever may be their merit or demerit, their author could only be one who, born in a modest condition, began by having the closest touch with frank unaffected human nature, and for whom life and society expanded by degrees, until, though still preferring the life removed, he could tell sad stories of the death of kings, find books in the running brooks, and good in everything.”
As he slowly uttered these familiar majestic words, he faded from my sight; and all that was left was an enduring recollection of that privileged interview.
Footnotes:
[1] In estimating Byron, people too often forget that the same poet wrote Manfred and Beppo, Childe Harold and Don Juan. It is the variety, in other words the extent, of Byron’s genius, that constitutes his greatness.
[2] The renderings into English verse from Dante are by the author of the paper.
Transcriber’s Notes: