to his memory in the sonnet which has these for its closing lines: "O heart whose beating blood was running song, True for thy truth's sake, for thy strength's sake strong, The nursing earth as the sepulchral sea." George Gordon Byron IN discussing the content of Shelley's poetry, we found it necessary to deal with him very largely as the product of his age, and especially as the preacher of the revolutionary gospel in its more spiritual phases and developments. Turning now to Byron, we again find the Revolution in the background of nearly all that he said and did, we find in it the explanation of nearly all that he was. In saying this I would not be taken to give unqualified assent to the doctrine of Taine which accounts for literature as a product of the race, the age, and the environment. Criticism has gone far beyond that doctrine, and recognises the claims of the incalculable element of individual genius. But with Byron and Shelley alike, the circumstances amid which they were nurtured, the intellectual and moral atmosphere of the period in which they lived, count for much more than they do with most poets, more even than they count for with the contemporaries of these men. I have spoken of Shelley as the child of the Revolution in its spiritual aspect; I must speak of Byron as the voice of the Revolution in its temper of revolt, its blind fury, its reckless destructiveness. Of course such distinctions as these are by no means hard and fast, but they express the fundamental contrast between the two poets. The intellect of Byron was less constructive than destructive, in that of Shelley the ratio becomes inverted. Byron's influence was in the main negative, his was "the spirit that denies"; Shelley's influence was in the main positive, and he was concerned far more with the affirmation of truth than with the denial of error./Professor Dowden embodies this distinction in the following beautiful simile: “As the wave of revolution rolls onward, driven forth from the vast volcanic upheaval in France, and as it becomes a portion of the literary movement of Great Britain, its dark and hissing crest may be the poetry of Byron; but over the tumultuous wave hangs an iris of beauty and promise, and that foam-bow of hope, flashing and failing, and ever reappearing as the wave sweeps on, is the poetry of Shelley. the qualities of the two poets differ, so have their fates proved diverse. Amid the fury of the tempest, the still small voice is heard by but few, yet to those whose ears are attuned to hear it the utterance is fraught with a deeper meaning than is found in the sound of the storm, and it remains a memory and an inspiration long after the heavens have cleared. In his own time, the poetry of Byron was one of the most tremendous intellectual forces that had ever stirred the souls of men; the poetry of Shelley, on the other hand, fell almost unheeded upon the general ear, and was slow in winning its way to the exalted place which it was destined to occupy in the As affections of mankind. The conditions are now almost completely reversed, and, while the poetry of Byron has lost its hold upon the mature intelligence, the poetry of Shelley has become strengthened from year to year in its influence, because its appeal is made to those instincts and sentiments which are the most enduring in human nature. In a word, the poetry of Shelley has everlasting value because it is endowed with everlasting beauty and truth; the poetry of Byron, on the other hand, has largely spent its force, and its present appeal is made directly to the immature mind alone, or indirectly to the mind that takes a greater satisfaction in renewing the life of the past than in living in the present or in contemplating the future. Byron was four years older than Shelley, and outlived him by two; the lives of these poets thus ran closely side by side, and their environment was practically the same. How differently they reacted to that environment does not need to be set forth in detail. Byron, like Shelley, came to manhood at a time when the revolutionary ideas had lost much of their force, and when the conservative reaction seemed well under way. The intellectual and emotional movement of which Byron was the central figure is to be described rather as a second revolution than as a direct continuation of the first. It was also a moral revolution, an uprising of the spirit against all the hypocrisies and empty forms that so weighed it down in England and elsewhere. It was a revolt, among other things, against what Mr. John Morley calls "that mean and poor form of domesticity which has always been too apt to fascinate the English imagination, ever since the last great effort of the Rebellion, and which rose to the climax of its popularity when George III. won all hearts by living like a farmer." As Mr. Morley goes on to say: "Instead of the fierce light beating about a throne, it played lambently upon a sty. And the nation who admired, imitated. When the Regent came, and with him that coarse profligacy which has alternated with cloudy insipidity in the annals of the line, the honest part of the world, out of antipathy to the son, was driven even further into domestic sentimentality of a greasy kind than it had gone from affection for the sire.” The society that could deserve such a characterisation as this needed a Byron to arouse it from its sluggishness and apathy. Whatever his intellectual faults, whatever the recklessness with which he made his attack upon the bulwarks of respectability, his influence was on the whole uplifting, and we must agree with our author in saying: "His fire, his lofty, spaciousness of outlook, his spirited interest in great national causes, his romance, and the passion both of his animosity and his sympathy, acted for a while like an electric current, and every one within his influence became ashamed to barter the large heritage of manhood, with its many realms and illimitable interests, for the sordid ease of the hearth and the good word of the unworthy." It was well that the |