Our bubbles; as the old burst, new emerge,
Lash’d from the foam of ages; while the graves
Of empire heave but like some passing waves.”
So writes Byron in the poem that contains perhaps his grandest and most powerful strains, interspersed among his wittiest and most wicked ones. If ever man was haunted by the conviction that we are shadows all, and that shadows are our pursuit, it was he. But with him there was nothing of a “saving faith” in this. As Shakspeare’s Prince of Arragon reads on the scroll at Belmont,
“Some there be that shadows kiss;
Such have but a shadow’s bliss;”
and of such was Byron. And he knew it. Not more alive to this philosophy was Cowper himself, when he pictured men
“For threescore years employed with ceaseless care
In catching smoke and feeding upon air;”
or when he pointed with this moral his lines on the felled poplars that once lent him a shade, beneath which he had so often been charmed by the blackbird’s sweet flowing ditty: