51.
The brow stamped “with the hieroglyphics of an eternal sorrow,” is a strong and beautiful expression of Bishop Taylor’s.
He says truly: “It is seldom that God sends such calamities upon men as men bring upon themselves and suffer willingly.” And again: “What will not tender women suffer to hide their shame!” What indeed! And again: “Nothing is intolerable that is necessary.” And again: “Nothing is to be esteemed evil which God and nature have fixed with eternal sanctions.”
There is not one of these ethical sentences which might not be treated as a text and expounded, opening into as many “branches” of consideration as ever did a Presbyterian sermon. Yet several involve a fallacy, as it seems to me;—others a deeper, wider, and more awful signification than Taylor himself seems to have contemplated when he uttered them.
52.
The same reasons which rendered Goethe’s “Werther” so popular, so passionately admired at the time it appeared—just after the seven years’ war,—helped to render Lord Byron so popular in his time. It was not the individuality of “Werther,” nor the individuality of “Childe Harold” which produced the effect of making them, for a time, a pervading power,—a part of the life of their contemporaries. It was because in both cases a chord was struck which was ready to vibrate. A phase of feeling preexistent, palpitating at the heart of society, which had never found expression in any poetic form since the days of Dante, was made visible and audible as if by an electric force; words and forms were given to a diffused sentiment of pain and resistance, caused by a long period of war, of political and social commotion, and of unhealthy moral excitement. “Werther” and “Childe Harold” will never perish; because, though they have ceased to be the echo of a wide despair, there will always be, unhappily, individual minds and hearts to respond to the individuality.
Lord Byron has sometimes, to use his own expression, “curdled” a whole world of meaning into the compass of one line:—