oon or the Ouse, or thriven among the Lincolnshire fens. He had a
sincere, if somewhat exclusive, delight in the storms and crags that
seemed to respond to his nature and to his age. There is no affectation in
the expression of the wish, "O that the desert were my dwelling-place!"
though we know that the writer on the shores of the Mediterranean still
craved for the gossip of the clubs. It only shows that--

Two desires toss about
The poet's feverish blood;
One drives him to the world without,
And one to solitude.

Of Byron's two contemporary rivals, Wordsworth had no feverish blood;
nothing drove him to the world without; consequently his "eyes avert their
ken from half of human fate," and his influence, though perennial, will
always be limited. He conquered England from his hills and lakes; but his
spirit has never crossed the Straits which he thought too narrow. The
other, with a fever in his veins, calmed it in the sea and in the cloud,
and, in some degree because of his very excellencies, has failed as yet to
mark the world at large. The poets' poet, the cynosure of enthusiasts, he
bore the banner of the forlorn hope; but Byron, with his feet of clay, led
the ranks. Shelley, as pure a philanthropist as St. Francis or Howard,
could forget mankind, and, like his Adonais, become one with nature.
Byron, who professed to hate his fellows, was of them even more than for
them, and so appealed to them through a broader sympathy, and held them
with a firmer hand. By virtue of his passion, as well as his power, he was
enabled to represent the human tragedy in which he played so many parts,
and to which his external universe of cloudless moons, and vales of
evergreen, and lightning-riven peaks, are but the various background. He
set the "anguish, doubt, desire," the whole chaos of his age, to a music
whose thunder-roll seems to have inspired the opera of _Lohengrin_--a
music not designed to teach or to satisfy "the budge doctors of the Stoic
fur," but which will continue to arouse and delight the sons and daughters
of men.

Madame de Stael said to Byron, at Ouchy, "It does not do to war with the
world: the world is too strong for the individual." Goethe only gives a
more philosophic form to this counsel when he remarks of the poet, "He put
himself into a false position by his assaults on Church and State. His
discontent ends in negation.... If I call _bad_ bad, what do I gain? But
if I call _good_ bad, I do