The extravagance of Shakespeare's Juliet, when she speaks of Romeo
being cut after his death into stars, that all the world may be in
love with night, is flame and ecstasy compared to the icy
metaphysical glitter of Byron's amorous allusions. The verses
beginning with

She walks in beauty like the light
Of eastern climes and starry skies,

are a perfect example of what I have conceived of his bodiless
admiration of beauty, and objectless enthusiasm of love. The
sentiment itself is unquestionably in the highest mood of the
intellectual sense of beauty; the simile is, however, anything but
such an image as the beauty of woman would suggest. It is only the
remembrance of some impression or imagination of the loveliness of a
twilight applied to an object that awakened the same abstract general
idea of beauty. The fancy which could conceive in its passion the
charms of a female to be like the glow of the evening, or the general
effect of the midnight stars, must have been enamoured of some
beautiful abstraction, rather than aught of flesh and blood. Poets
and lovers have compared the complexion of their mistresses to the
hues of the morning or of the evening, and their eyes to the dewdrops
and the stars; but it has no place in the feelings of man to think of
female charms in the sense of admiration which the beauties of the
morning or the evening awaken. It is to make the simile the
principal. Perhaps, however, it may be as well to defer the
criticism to which this peculiar characteristic of Byron's amatory
effusions gives rise, until we shall come to estimate his general
powers as a poet. There is upon the subject of love, no doubt, much
beautiful composition. throughout his works; but not one line in all
the thousands which shows a sexual feeling of female attraction--all
is vague and passionless, save in the delicious rhythm of the verse.

But these remarks, though premature as criticisms, are not uncalled
for here, even while we are speaking of a child not more than ten
years old. Before Byron had attained that age, he describes himself
as having felt the passion. Dante is said as early as nine years old
to have fallen in love with Beatrice; Alfieri, who was himself
precocious in the passion, considered such early sensibility to be an
unerring sign of a soul formed for the fine arts; and Canova used to
say that he was in love when but five years old. But these
instances, however, prove nothing. Calf