"Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow
Of Adria toward Venice, a bare strand
Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand,
Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,"
is one of everlasting value. Returning to dinner at six or seven, he conversed with his friends till midnight, and then sat down to write.
Thus we have traced this great and singular man from the mountains of the Scottish Highlands, where he roamed as a boy, from land to land, till he stood as a liberator on the shores of Greece, and was seen for a few months riding forth with his long train of Suliote guards, and then was at once lost to Greece and the world. In no short life was there ever more to applaud and to condemn, to wonder at and to deplore. From those hereditary and other causes which we have already noticed, the temperament of Byron was passionate to the excess; but this extreme sensibility, which was the food and foundation of his splendid genius, was at the same time the torture of his existence. Misunderstood where he ought to have been soothed with the deepest tenderness, attacked by the public where he should have been most closely sympathized with, he went forth, as it were, reckless of peace or of character. A series of adulterous connections darkened his glorious reputation, and served to justify in the eyes of the public the accusations of those who had goaded him to these very excesses. But spite of the censures of the world, and reproaches of his own conscience, the powers of his genius continually grew till they even forced into the silence of astonishment the most heartless of his detractors. To say nothing of those grand and somber metaphysical dramas, Manfred, Cain, and the rest which he wrote in Italy, the poem alone of Childe Harold, ever ascending in magnificent strength, richness, and beauty, as it advanced, was sufficient to give him an immortality second to no other. The wide and superb field of its action—that of all the finest countries of Europe; the great events—those of the most stirring and momentous age of the whole world; and the illustrious names which it wove into its living mass; the glorious remains of art, and the still more glorious features of nature in Italy and Greece, all combined to render Childe Harold the great poem of his own, and the favorite of every after age. Totally different as he was under different impressions, Childe Harold had the transcendent advantage of being the product of that mood which was inspired only by the contemplation of every object calculated to draw him away from the seductions of society, and the lower tones of his mind; the mood inspired by the most august objects of heaven and of earth—the midnight skies, the Alpine mountains, the sublimities of mighty rivers and oceans, the basking beauties of southern nature, and the crumbling but unrivaled works of man. Filled with all these images of nobility and greatness, he gave them back to his page with a tone so philosophically profound, with a music so thrilling, with a dignity so graceful and yet so tender, that nothing in poetry can be conceived more fascinating and perfect. Every thought is so clearly and fully developed, every image is so substantial and so strongly defined, and the very skepticism which here and there betrays itself comes forth so accompanied by a pensive, earnest, and intense longing after life, that it resembles the melancholy tone which pervades the book of Job, and some of the prophets, more than that of any other human, much less modern composition. We may safely assert that there are a hundred combining causes, in the subjects and the spirit of Childe Harold, to render it to every future age the most lovely and endearing gift from this. Don Juan, the reflex of Byron's ordinary, as this was of his solitary and higher life—his life alone with Nature and with God—has its wonderful and inimitable passages; but Childe Harold is one woven mass of beauty and intellectual gold from end to end.
In judging the errors of Lord Byron, there is one consideration calculated to disarm severity perhaps more than all others. The excesses in which he had indulged were made by Providence the means of the severest punishment that could befall him. The cause of Greece aroused his spirit, at that period of life when life should have been in its prime, and a new scene of most glorious ambition was spread to him, that of adding to the unrivaled renown of the poet the still more grateful renown of becoming the savior of a country and a people, whom the triumphs of ancient art, science, liberty, and literature had made, as it were, kindred to the whole world. This august prospect was unveiled to him, and he rushed forward to secure it; but his constitution, sapped by vicious indulgence, gave way; the brilliant promise of new and loftiest glories was snatched from him; he sunk and perished. Reflecting on this, the hardest moralist could not desire a sadder retribution; and they who love rather to seek in the corrupt mass of humanity for the original germs of the divine nature, will turn with Mr. Moore to the fair side, and acquiesce most cordially in the concluding words of his biography. "It would not be in the power, indeed, of the most poetical friend to allege any thing more convincingly favorable of his character than is contained in the few simple facts, that, through life, with all his faults, he never lost a friend; that those about him in his youth, whether as companions, teachers, or servants, remained attached to him to the last; that the woman to whom he gave the love of his maturer years idolizes his name; and that, with a single unhappy exception, scarce an instance is to be found of any one once brought, however briefly, into relations of amity with him, that did not feel toward him a kind regard in life, and retain a fondness for his memory."
END OF VOL. I.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Vinegar.
[2] Ireland, when, in 1793, he collected his "Views on the Avon," was much struck with the likeness of this bust in Thomas Hart, one of this family who then lived in Shakspeare's house.