The arena swims around him-he is gone

Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hailed the wretch who won.

He heard it, but he heeded not-his eyes
Were with his heart, and that was far away:
He reck'd not of the life he lost, nor prize,
But where his rude hut by the Danube lay-
There were his young barbarians all at play,
There was their Dacian mother-he, their sire,
Butcher'd to make a Roman holiday-

All this rush'd with his blood.-Shall he expire
And unavenged? Arise, ye Goths, and glut your ire!"

In this, there is genuine poetic vision, genuine feeling; in a word, true imaginative power, and wondrous words of simple English to give voice to it.

It

I would refer to another passage, less striking, but also characteristic of Byron's best power, and which I wish to cite, because it admirably exemplifies how simple, both in conception and in expression, is true poetic sublimity. is the passage in which the poet, assuming the character of a Greek, utters his emotion on the plain of Marathon; and the imaginative truth and sublimity of the lines admit of a very simple analysis. There are presented two of the grandest of earth's natural objects—a range of mountains on the one side, and the sea on the other; between them a tract of ground hallowed by one of the world's greatest battles, the victory that saved Europe from Asia's conquest; and that combining power, which is one of the chief functions of the imagination-not only groups, nay, more than groups-unites these three great objects, mountain, plain, and ocean, with all their memories, but also vivifies them with the deep emotion of the solitary human being standing in the midst of them :

"The mountains look on Marathon,
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,

I thought that Greece might still be free;
For standing on the Persian's grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.

A king sat on the rocky brow,

Which looks o'er seaborn Salamis;
And ships, by thousands, lay below,
And men in nations; all were his!
He counted them at break of day;

And when the sun set, where were they?"

Such passages illustrate the best moods of Byron's genius, and it would be agreeable to unweave more of the same description from all that is false and morbid in his poetry, but such a process would be altogether inadequate for the understanding of that poetry and the influence it exerted. When we remember how largely a weak sentimentalism entered into that popularity, there can be little doubt that it was won by the poet's weakness as well as by his power; by what was morbid as well as by what was healthful. We may form a judgment now of the character of his poetry, by looking at his dealing with what were his two chief themes, human character, and the material world—the universe of sight and sound. Now with regard to his treatment of human character, whether it be in the expression of his own thoughts and feelings, or in the invention of poetic persons, and whether these inventions be meant to be independent of himself, or to shadow forth his own nature, there is, in all, disease, deep-seated, clinging disease. You search in vain for a single healthful impersonation of humanity; all the creations are hol

low images, with no life or heart in them. Turn to Shakspeare's creations, even those most removed from common life, or follow Spenser into the shadowy regions of Fairy Land, or Milton into his supernatural spaces, and so faithful are their creations to a deep science of humanity, that every human heart recognises the truth of them: they live and have a reality by virtue of their poetic truthfulness. But of Byron's heroes or of his heroines, which is a natural, truthful character, such as great poets give for the admiration or for the admonition of their fellow-beings? No pure and lofty idea of womanhood appeared in his female personages; he scarce lifts them above the sensual softness of oriental degradation, investing it in a delusive light of false and fanciful sentiment. His male personages (they are not truthful enough to be called characters) are strangely alike in their unreality. "But" (as has been justly remarked by the sagacious author of Philip Van Artavelde*) "there is yet a worse defect in them. Lord Byron's conception of a hero, is an evidence not only of scanty materials of knowledge from which to construct the ideal of a human being, but also of a want of perception of what is great or noble in our nature. His heroes are creatures abandoned to their passions, and essentially, therefore, weak of mind. Strip them of the veil of mystery and the trappings of poetry, resolve them into their plain realities, and they are such beings as, in the eyes of a reader of masculine judgment, would certainly excite no sentiment of admiration, even if they did not provoke contempt. When the conduct and feelings. attributed to them are reduced into prose, and brought to

Preface to Philip Van Artavelde, p. xv.

the test of a rational consideration, they must be perceived to be beings in whom there is no strength, except that of their intensely selfish passions; in whom all is vanity; their exertions being for vanity under the name of love or revenge, and their sufferings for vanity under the name of pride. If such beings as these are to be regarded as heroical, where in human nature are we to look for what is low in sentiment or infirm in character?”

How nobly opposite to Lord Byron's ideal was that conception of an heroical character which took life and immortality from the hand of Shakspeare:

"Give me that man

That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him

In my heart's core; ay, in my heart of heart."

It was, however, with these fictions, that the popular fancy was fascinated, not only because the poet's genius gave a charm to them, but because that which addresses itself to what is false and morbid in man or woman will find a response, happily only for a time. In like manner, there was an attraction in the unreserved disclosures which the poet was all the while making of his own feelings and passions, taking the large concourse of his listeners into his confidence; and running through those feelings there was the poison of moral disease. On the pages of Byron you can scarce escape from some form or other of morbid feeling, a vicious egotism, pride, contempt, misanthropy: these are attributes not of strength, but of weakness; and knowing, as we now do, the story of his career, is it not pitiful that one so gifted should have gone whining through life, complaining of man, and rebellious of God, and all the while self-indulgent alike in sensual and sentimental voluptuousness? It is well said, that if life be

ever so unfortunate, a man's folding his hands over it in melancholy mood, and suffering himself to be made a puppet by it, is a sadly weak proceeding. Most thoughtful men have probably some dark fountains in their souls, by the side of which, if there were time, and it were decorous, they could let their thoughts sit down and wail indefinitely. That long Byron wail fascinated men for a time, because there is that in human nature."* Herein was the mischief that Byron's poetry did in its season of authority: reversing the poet's function, which is to heal what is unhealthy, to strengthen what is weak, to chasten what is corrupt, and to lift up what is sinking down: he fostered what was false, ministered to what was morbid, and, moreover, tempted them on to the willing delusion that their weakness was strength. Thus unreal and false habits of feeling were engendered, and men and women, under this delusion, grew sentimental and fantastic, and flattered themselves that there was beauty in the ugliness of pride, that there was magnanimity in the littleness of contempt, and depth of passion in the shallowness of discontent, and majesty in unmanly moodiness and misanthropy. Now all this, which came from the Byron teaching, was false both in morals and in poetry; for in this mortal life crowded with its realities for every hour of every human being's existence, all fantastic and self-occupied sadness is a folly and a sin―unmanly in man, unpoetic in the poet, well rebuked by a woman-poet's strenuous words:

.

"We overstate the ills of life, and take

Imagination, given us to bring down
The choirs of singing angels, overshone

By God's clear glory,-down our earth to rake

Friends in Council, p. 198.