uld say, if
they dared, that there will never be such another again. He appeared at
the moment when society was restless and miserable, and discontented
with the Fates and the universe and all that it contained. The general
sensibility had not for long found any expression in poetry. Literature
seemed something quite apart from experience, and with which none but
a particular class had any concern. At such a time, when Europe
lay desolate under the ravage and incessant menace of the French
Empire,--when England had an insane King, a profligate Regent, an
atrocious Ministry, and a corrupt Parliament,--when the war drained the
kingdom of its youth, and every class of its resources,--when there was
chronic discontent in the manufacturing districts, and hunger among the
rural population, with a perpetual extension of pauperism, swallowing
up the working and even the middle classes,--when everybody was full of
anxiety, dread, or a reactionary recklessness,--there suddenly appeared
a new strain of poetry which seemed to express every man's mood. Every
man took up the song. Byron's musical woe resounded through the land.
People who had not known exactly what was the matter with them now found
that life was what Byron said it was, and that they were sick of it. I
can well remember the enthusiasm,--the better, perhaps, for never having
shared it. At first I was too young, and afterwards I found too much of
moods and too little of matter to create any lasting attachment to
his poetry. But the music of it rang in all ears, and the rush of its
popularity could not be resisted by any but downright churlish persons.
I remember how ladies, in morning calls, recited passages of Byron to
each other,--and how gentlemen, in water-parties, whispered his short
poems to their next neighbor. If a man was seen walking with his head
down and his lips moving, he was revolving Byron's last romance; and
children who began, to keep albums wrote, in double lines on the first
page, some stanza which caught them by its sound, if they were not up to
its sense. On some pane in every inn-window there was a scrap of Byron;
and in young ladies' portfolios there were portraits of the poet,
recognizable, through all bad drawing and distortion, by the cast of the
beautiful features and the Corsair style. Where a popularity like this
sprang up, there must be sufficient reason for it to cause it to involve
more or less all orders of minds; and the wisest and most