p the mountain in his mind's embrace.
(_The Island_.)

and in _The Island_ he says:

How often we forget all time, when lone,
Admiring Nature's universal throne,
Her woods, her wilds, her waters, the intense
Reply of hers to our intelligence!
Live not the stars and mountains? Are the waves
Without a spirit? Are the dropping cares
Without a feeling in their silent tears?
No, no; they woo and clasp us to their spheres,
Dissolve this clog and clod of clay before
Its hour, and merge our soul in the great shore.
(_The Island_.)

Byron's feeling was thus, like Goethe's in _Werther_ and _Faust_, a
pantheistic sympathy. But there was this great difference between
them--Goethe's mind passed through its period of storm and stress,
and attained a serene and ripe vision; Byron's never did. Melancholy
and misanthropy always mingled with his feelings; he was, in fact,
the father of our modern 'world-pain.'

Still more like a brilliant meteor that flashes and is gone was
Shelley, the most highly strung of all modern lyrists. With him, too,
love of Nature amounted to a passion; but it was with her remote
aerial forms that he was most at home. His imagination, a cosmic one,
revelling among the spheres, was like Byron's in its preference for
the great, wide, and distant; but unlike his in giving first place to
the serene and passionless. As Brandes says: 'In this familiarity
with the great forms and movements of Nature, Shelley is like Byron;
but like him as a fair genius is like a dark one, as Ariel is like
the flame-bringing angel of the morning star.'

We see his love for the sea, especially at rest, in the 'Stanzas
written in dejection near Naples,' which contain the beautiful line
which proved so prophetic of his death:

The sun is warm, the sky is clear,
The waves are dancing fast and bright;
Blue isles and snowy mountains wear
The purple noon's transparent might....
I see the deep's untrampled floor
With green and purple sea-weeds strewn;
I see the waves upon the shore
Like light dissolved, in star showers thrown....
Yet now despair itself is mild,
Even as the winds and waters are;
I could lie down like a tired child
And weep away the life of care
Which I have borne, and yet must bear,--
Till death like sleep might steal on me,
And I might feel in the warm air
My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea