or satiate. One is never
oppressed by too heavy a weight of natural beauty. A single tree
against the sky--a single shadow upon the pathway--a single petal
fallen on the grass; these are enough to transport us to those fields of
light and "chambers of the sun" where the mystic dance of creation
still goes on; these are enough to lead us to the hushed
dew-drenched lawns where the Lord God walks in the garden "in the cool
of the day."

One associates the poetry of William Blake, not with the mountain
peaks and gorgeous foliage and rushing torrents of a landscape that
clamours to be admired and would fain overpower us with its
picturesque appeal, but with the quietest, gentlest, softest, least
assuming background to that "going forth" to our work, "and our
labour until the evening," which is the normal destiny of man.

The pleasant fields of Felpham with their hawthorne hedges, the
little woods of Hertfordshire or Surrey with their patches of
bluebells, were all that he needed to set him among the company of
the eternal gods.

For this is the prerogative of imagination, that it can reconcile us to
life where life is simplest and least adorned; and this is the
reluctance and timidity of imagination that it shrinks away into
twilight and folds its wings, when the pressure of reality is too heavy,
and the materials of beauty too oppressive and tyrannous.

BYRON

It is in a certain sense a lamentable indictment upon the
sheepishness and inertness of the average crowd that a figure like
that of Byron should have been so exceptional in his own day and
should be so exceptional still. For, godlike rascal as he was, he was
made of quite normal stuff.

There was nothing about him of that rare magical quality which
separates such poets as Shelley or Edgar Allan Poe or Paul Verlaine
from the mass of ordinary people. The Byronic type, as it is called,
has acquired a certain legendary glamour; but it is nothing, when we
come really to analyse it, but the universal type of vain, impetuous,
passionate youth, asserting itself with royal and resplendent
insolence in defiance of the cautious discretion of middle-aged
conventions.

Youth is essentially Byronic when it is natural and fearless and
strong; and it is a melancholy admission of something timid and
sluggish in us all that we should speak "with bated breath and
whispering humbleness" of this brilliant figure. A little more
courage, a little less false modesty, a little