[261] In the poem by the Swiss poet C. Didier from which Longfellow’s poem seems to be derived, the youth who persists in scaling the heights in spite of all warnings is Byron!
Et Byron … disparaît aux yeux du pâtre épouvanté.
(See E. Estève, Byron en France, 147).
[262] In the Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe Chateaubriand quotes from the jottings of Napoleon on the island of Elba. “Mon cœur se refuse aux joies communes comme à la douleur ordinaire.” He says of Napoleon elsewhere in the same work: “Au fond il ne tenait à rien: homme solitaire, il se suffisait; le malheur ne fit que le rendre au désert de sa vie.”
[263] The solitude of the “genius” is already marked in Blake:
O! why was I born with a different face?
Why was I not born like the rest of my race?
When I look, each one starts; when I speak, I offend;
Then I’m silent and passive and lose every friend.
[264] Froude’s Carlyle, II, 377.