Sets me more distant from a prosperous course.”
His refined and exquisite sense of the beautiful in poesy could not be surpassed. His pictures of mortal loveliness are quite inimitable, and there is at times in the strains of his muse, in the very structure of his language, a tenderness, which it would seem impossible could co-exist with that severity so often, so naturally sharpening into sarcasm, as if it were a part of the staple of his mind. The lash of criticism having first roused up the dormant energies of his genius, his first impulse was to seize the sharpest weapons of satire he could find, and even the poisoned arrows of vituperation and slander, and with a power and precision of archery seldom surpassed, to take his full measure of retaliation. Nay, he became so fond of the sport, or so unable otherwise to satisfy his revenge, that he multiplied innocent victims, assailing his own relations, and even the noble, generous, genial Scott, whose maxim it was never to provoke or be provoked, especially in his intercourse with the irritable tribe of authors. Firmly and calmly Scott resolved to receive the fire of all sorts of assailants, who were engaged in the “raving warfare of satire, parody, and sarcasm.” This sudden, bellicose production of Byron’s impulsive genius—English Bards and Scotch Reviewers—cost even him shame and sorrow the rest of his life. But still he was ever fond of sailing on that quarter. His impulses must ever be of the fiery, fitful kind. It is a wonder that, among all his paradoxes and peregrinations, he did not pay a visit to the Dead Sea. That would have been a congenial pilgrimage for Childe Harold; and, then, for such a drake as he was to swim in its waters! The exploit of Leander was only repeated by him from Sestus to Abydos. The other would have been an original feat, worthy of the taste of a man who preferred drinking out of a skull to the usual mode of potation out of the ordinary goblets of civilization.
Severe, scornful, passionate, vengeful, as he often was, how do those stern features relax, and the milder sensibilities rise into tender exercise, when, as a father in exile, he writes:
“My daughter! with thy name this song begun,
My daughter! with thy name thus much shall end.
I see thee not—I hear thee not—but none
Can be so wrapt in thee; thou art the friend
To whom the shadows of far years extend;
Albeit my brow thou never shouldst behold,
My voice shall with thy future visions blend,