Beneath her steady ray
The desert-circle spreads
Like the round ocean, girdled with the sky.
How beautiful is night!
But all that previous English poets had done seemed harmless and innocent in comparison with Byron's revolutionary poetry. Prophecy in Rousseau became poetry in Byron.
There was much common ground between these two passionate aspiring spirits, who never attained to Goethe's serenity. Both were melancholy, and fled from their fellows; both strove for perfect liberty and unlimited self-assertion; both felt with the wild and uproarious side of Nature, and found idyllic scenes marred by thoughts of mankind.
Byron's turbulence never subsided; and his love for Nature, passionate and comprehensive as it was, was always 'sickled o'er' with misanthropy and pessimism, with the 'world-pain.'
He turned to her first through disdain of his kind and love of introspection, and later on, when he was spurned by the London world which had been at his feet, and disdain grew into hatred and disgust, from a wish to be alone. But, as Boettger says:
Though this heart, in which the whole universe is reflected, is a sick one, it has immeasurable depths, and an intensified spirit life which draws everything under its sway and inspires it, feeling and observing everything only as part of itself.
The basis of Byron's feeling for Nature was a revolutionary one--elementary passion. The genius which threw off stanza after stanza steeped in melody, was coupled with an unprecedented subjectivity and individualism. When the first part of Childe Harold came out, dull London society was bewitched by the music and novelty of this enthusiastic lyric of Nature, with its incomparable interweaving of scenery and feeling: