speaking for mankind generally, and is not concerned with
his own beliefs or disbeliefs.]

[347] {284} [The poet would follow in the wake of the clouds. He must
pierce them, and bend his steps to the region of their growth, the
mountain-top, where earth begets and air brings forth the vapours.
Another interpretation is that the Alps must be pierced in order to
attain the great and ever-ascending regions of the mountain-tops
("greater and greater as we proceed"). In the next stanza he pictures
himself looking down from the summit of the Alps on Italy, the goal of
his pilgrimage.]

[348] [The Roman Empire engulfed and comprehended the great empires of
the past--the Persian, the Carthaginian, the Greek. It fell, and
kingdoms such as the Gothic (A.D. 493-554), the Lombardic (A.D. 568-774)
rose out of its ashes, and in their turn decayed and passed away.]

[349] {285} [The task imposed upon his soul, which dominates every other
instinct, is the concealment of any and every emotion--"love, or hate,
or aught," not the concealment of the particular emotion "love or hate,"
which may or may not be the "master-spirit" of his thought. He is
anxious to conceal his feelings, not to keep the world in the dark as to
the supreme feeling which holds the rest subject.]

[kw] _They are but as a self-deceiving wile_.-[MS. erased.]

[kx] _The shadows of the things that pass along_.--[MS.]

[ky] {286}
_Fame is the dream of boyhood--I am not_
_So young as to regard the frown or smile_
_Of crowds as making an immortal lot_.--[MS. (lines 6, 7 erased).]

[350] [Compare Shakespeare, _Coriolanus_, act iii. sc. 1, lines 66, 67--

"For the mutable, rank-scented many, let them
Regard me as I do not flatter."]

[351] [Compare _Manfred_, act ii. sc. 2, lines 54-57--

"My spirit walked not with the souls of men,
Nor looked upon the earth with human eyes;
The thirst of their ambition was not mine,
The aim of their existence was not mine."]

[kz] {287} _O'er misery unmixedly some grieve_.--[MS.]

[352] [Byron was at first in some doubt whether he should or should not
publish the "concluding stanzas of _Childe Harold_ (those to my
_daughter_);" but in a letter to Murray, October 9, 1816, he reminds him
of his later determination to publish them with "the rest of the
Canto."]

[353] {288} ["His allusions to me in _Childe Harold_ are cruel and cold,
but with such a semblance as to make _me_ appear so, and