And reach into thy heart—when mine is cold,
A token and a tone, even from thy father’s mould.”
Thus, with a certain style of uniformity everywhere observable, especially in his characters, there is much variety of thought, emotion and passion, evidential of great fertility of mind. If he does reproduce the same hero under different names, and even give strong indications of his identification with himself, still the wand of the enchanter invests him with so many brilliant aspects, places him in so many imposing attitudes, as to produce all the effect of novelty. His muse less delights in planning incidents and grouping characters, than in working out, as with the sculptor’s energetic art, single, stern, striking models of heroic humanity, albeit stained with dangerous vices. His very genius has been declared to be inspired with the classic enthusiasm that has produced some of the most splendid specimens of the chisel; “his heroes stand alone, as upon marble pedestals, displaying the naked power of passion, or the wrapped up and reposing energy of grief.” Medora, Gulnare, Lara, Manfred, Childe Harold, might each furnish an original from which the sculptor could execute copies, that would stand the proud impressive symbols of manliness or of loveliness, satisfying even those intense dreams of beauty which poets and lovers sometimes indulge in their solitary musings.
“There, too, the goddess loves in stone, and fills
The air around with beauty; we inhale
The ambrosial aspect, which, beheld, instils
Part of its immortality.” Childe Harold.
This poem, indeed, is a perfect gallery of art, whose paintings and statues are drawn and fashioned from the life, with the skill of a consummate master and the facility of a powerful creative, divinely endowed genius. He places his hand on the broad canvas of life, and behold the figures that rise under his magic pencil! They are, indeed, too often dark, stern, mysterious and awful, stained with vices, and pre-doomed, for their guilt, to the pains of a terrible reprobation. With such characters the genius of Byron had a strange sympathy. Hence his admiration of that historical passage in the Scriptures, in which the crime and the doom of Saul is so solemnly set forth at the tomb of the prophet Samuel, whose sepulchral slumbers were so rudely disturbed by the intrusion of the anxious and distressed monarch, now forsaken by his God. Shakspeare, having finished off one of these dark and repulsive pictures, as in his Macbeth or Lear, passes to the sketching of more cheerful and even humorous portraits; but Byron, for the most part, delights to dwell in darkness. Thus, in this poem, when the curse is imprecated, the time midnight, the scene the ruined site of the temple of the Furies, the auditors the ghosts of departed years, the imprecator a spirit fallen from an unwonted height of glory to the depths of wo. Principals and accessaries assume the sombre coloring of his imagination, from which, however, at times, shoots a gleam of beauty, that imparts loveliness to the whole scene. Milton, with his almost perfect sense of beauty, and the fitness of things, would never have put such words as these in the mouth of his Eve:
“May the grass wither from thy foot! the woods
Deny thee shelter—earth a home—the dust