which is to be found in Manfred and might have been taken from the Excursion.
When we turn from the plays to the lyrics, we see at once the importance, to a poet, of choosing rightly the metrical form that is the best expression of his peculiar genius. In some of these shorter poems Byron rises to his highest level, and by these will his popularity be permanently maintained. They are certainly of very unequal merit; yet when Byron is condemned for artificiality and glaring colour, we may point to the poem beginning 'And thou art dead, as young and fair,' where form and feeling are in harmony throughout eight long stanzas, without a single line that is feeble or overcharged:
'The better days of life were ours;
The worst can be but mine;
The sun that cheers, the storm that lowers,
Shall never more be thine.
The silence of that dreamless sleep
I envy now too much to weep;
Nor need I to repine
That all those charms have passed away,
I might have watched through long decay.'
There is no novelty in the ideas, nor does he open the deeper vein of thoughts that touch the mind with a sense of mortality. Yet the verse has a masculine brevity that renders effectively the attitude in which men may well be content firmly to confront an irreparable misfortune.
In his poems of strenuous action, although Byron has not the rare quality of heroic simplicity, he could at times strike a high vibrating war note, and could interpret romantically the patriotic spirit. The two stanzas which we quote from the Hebrew Melodies show that he could now and then shake off the redundant metaphors and epithets that overload too much of his impetuous verse, and use his strength freely:
'Though thou art fall'n, while we are free
Thou shalt not taste of death!
The generous blood that flowed from thee
Disdained to sink beneath;
Within our veins its currents be,
Thy spirit on our breath.
'Thy name, our charging hosts along,
Shall be their battle word!
Thy fall, the theme of choral song
From virgin voices poured!
To weep would do thy glory wrong;
Thou shalt not be deplored.'
And we have another magnificent example of Byron's lyrical power in the Isles of Greece, where the two lines,
'Ah, no! the voices of the dead
Sound like a distant torrent's fall,'