A shudder comes o’er me—
Why wert thou so dear?
They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well;
Long, long shall I rue thee
Too deeply to tell.”
Naturally enough, our poet is beaming with the success of his satire, which is widely read, and which has made him foes of the first rank; but what cares he for this? He goes down with a company of fellow roisterers, and makes the old walls of Newstead ring with the noisy celebration of his twenty-first birthday; and on the trail of that country revel, and with the sharp, ringing couplets of his “English Bards” crackling on the public ear, he breaks away for his first joyous experience of Continental travel. This takes him through Spain and to the Hellespont and among the isles of Greece—seeing visions there and dreaming dreams, all which are braided into that tissue of golden verse we know as the first two cantos of Childe Harold.
On his return, and while as yet this poem of travel is on the eve of publication, he prepares himself for a new coup in Parliament—being not without his oratorical ambitions. It was in February of 1812 that he made his maiden speech in the House of Lords—carefully worded, calm, not without quiet elegancies of diction—but not meeting such reception as his extravagant expectation demanded; whatever he does, he wishes met with a tempest of approval; a dignified welcome, to his fiery nature, seems cold.
But the publication of Childe Harold, only a short time later, brings compensating torrents of praise. His satire had piqued attention without altogether satisfying it; there was little academic merit in it—none of the art which made Absalom and Achitophel glow, or which gleamed upon the sword-thrusts of the Dunciad; but its stabs were business-like; its couplets terse, slashing, and full of truculent, scorching vires iræ. This other verse, however, of Childe Harold—which took one upon the dance of waves and under the swoop of towering canvass to the groves of “Cintra’s glorious Eden,” and among those Spanish vales where Dark Guadiana “rolls his power along;” and thence on, by proud Seville, and fair Cadiz, to those shores of the Egean, where
“Still his honeyed wealth Hymettus yields,—”[64]