always attained in the society of a chosen
few, might, he hoped, be found in solitude, face to face with nature.
But it was not to be. Even nature was powerless to "minister to a mind
diseased." At the conclusion of his second tour (September 29, 1816), he
is constrained to admit that "neither the music of the shepherd, the
crashing of the avalanche, nor the torrent, the mountain, the glacier,
the forest, nor the cloud, have for one moment lightened the weight upon
my heart, nor enabled me to lose my own wretched identity in the
majesty, and the power, and the glory, around, above, and beneath me"
(_Life_, p. 315). Perhaps Wordsworth had this confession in his mind
when, in 1834, he composed the lines, "Not in the Lucid Intervals of
Life," of which the following were, he notes, "written with Lord Byron's
character as a past before me, and that of others, his contemporaries,
who wrote under like influences:"--

"Nor do words,
Which practised talent readily affords,
Prove that his hand has touched responsive chords
Nor has his gentle beauty power to move
With genuine rapture and with fervent love
The soul of Genius, if he dare to take
Life's rule from passion craved for passion's sake;
Untaught that meekness is the cherished bent
Of all the truly great and all the innocent.
But who is innocent? By grace divine,
Not otherwise, O Nature! are we thine,
Through good and evil there, in just degree
Of rational and manly sympathy."
_The Works of W. Wordsworth_, 1889, p. 729.

Wordsworth seems to have resented Byron's tardy conversion to "natural
piety," regarding it, no doubt, as a fruitless and graceless endeavour
without the cross to wear the crown. But if Nature reserves her balms
for "the innocent," her quality of inspiration is not "strained." Byron,
too, was nature's priest--

"And by that vision splendid
Was on his way attended."]

[jc] {259} _In its own deepness_----[MS.]

[316] [The metaphor is derived from a hot spring which appears to boil
over at the moment of its coming to the surface. As the particles of
water, when they emerge into the light, break and bubble into a seething
mass; so, too, does passion chase and beget passion in the "hot throng"
of general interests and individual desires.]

[jd] _One of a worthless world--to strive where none are strong._--[MS.]

[317] [The thought whic