Live not the stars and mountains? Are the waves
Without a spirit? Are the dropping cares
Without a feeling in their silent tears?
No, no; they woo and clasp us to their spheres,
Dissolve this clog and clod of clay before
Its hour, and merge our soul in the great shore.
(The Island.)
Byron's feeling was thus, like Goethe's in Werther and Faust, a pantheistic sympathy. But there was this great difference between them--Goethe's mind passed through its period of storm and stress, and attained a serene and ripe vision; Byron's never did. Melancholy and misanthropy always mingled with his feelings; he was, in fact, the father of our modern 'world-pain.'
Still more like a brilliant meteor that flashes and is gone was Shelley, the most highly strung of all modern lyrists. With him, too, love of Nature amounted to a passion; but it was with her remote aerial forms that he was most at home. His imagination, a cosmic one, revelling among the spheres, was like Byron's in its preference for the great, wide, and distant; but unlike his in giving first place to the serene and passionless. As Brandes says: 'In this familiarity with the great forms and movements of Nature, Shelley is like Byron; but like him as a fair genius is like a dark one, as Ariel is like the flame-bringing angel of the morning star.'
We see his love for the sea, especially at rest, in the 'Stanzas written in dejection near Naples,' which contain the beautiful line which proved so prophetic of his death: