ve. It seems a normal revolt against normal restrictions.
The ordinary man understands it and condones it, remembering the
fires of his own youth.

Besides, Byron was a lord.

Goethe declared to Eckermann that what irritated many people
against Byron was the power and pride of his personality--the fact
that his personality stood out in so splendid and emphatic a way.

Goethe was right. The brilliance of Byron's personality is a thing
which causes curious annoyance to certain types of mind. But these
minds are not the normal ones of common intelligence. They are
minds possessed of the sort of intellectual temper naturally
antagonistic to reckless youth. They are the Carlyles and the
Merediths of that spiritual and philosophical vision to which the
impassioned normality of Byron with his school-boy ribaldry must
always appear ridiculous.

I believe it will be found that those to whom the idea of Byron's
brilliant and wayward personality brings exquisite pleasure are, in
the first place, quite simple minds, and, in the second place, minds
of a disillusioned and un-ethical order who have grown weary of
"deep spiritual thinkers," and are ready to enjoy, as a refreshing
return to the primitive emotions, this romantic swashbucklerism
which proves so annoying to earnest modern thought.

How like a sudden reverberation of the old immortal spirit of
romance, the breath of whose saddest melancholy seems sweeter
than our happiness, is that clear-toned song of passion's exhaustion
which begins

"We'll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon"

and which contains that magnificent verse,

"For the sword outwears the sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest."

It is extraordinary the effect which poetry of this kind has upon us
when we come upon it suddenly, after a long interval, in the
crowded pages, say, of some little anthology.

I think the pleasure which it gives us is due to the fact that it is so
entirely sane and normal and natural; so solidly and massively
within the circle of our average apprehension; so expressive of what
the common flesh and blood of our elemental humanity have come
to feel as permanent in their passions and reactions. It gives us a
thrilling shock of surprise when we come upon it unexpectedly--this
kind of thing; the more so because the poetry we have grown
accustomed to, in our generation, i