themselves in upon one's lips, when one's feelings were
stirred to the old tune, to realise how great a poet Byron was.

"Fare thee well and, if forever,
Still forever fare thee well!"

Can such things ever grow "stale and rung-upon," however much the
chilly hand of a pedantic psychology seeks to brush the bloom away
from the wings of the bird of paradise?

Those poems to the mysterious Thyrza, can any modern eroticism
equal them, for large and troubled abandonment; natural as gasping
human speech and musical as the murmur of deep waters?

Byron is frankly and outrageously the poet of _sentiment._ This is
good. This is what one craves for in vain in modern verse. The
infernal seriousness of our grave youngsters and their precious
psychological irony make them terrified of any approach to
sentiment. They leave such matters with supreme contempt to the
poor little devils who write verses for the local newspapers. They
are too clever to descend to sentiment. It is their affair to show us
the absurdity of sentiment.

And yet the world is full of this thing. It has the rising sap of a
thousand springs in its heart. It has the "big rain" of the suppressed
tears of a hundred generations in its sobbing music.

It is easy to say that Byron's sentiment was a pose.

The precise opposite of this is the truth. It is our poetic cleverness,
our subjective imagery and cosmic irony, which is the pose; not his
frank and boyish expression of direct emotion.

We write poetry for the sake of writing poetry. He wrote to give
vent to the passions of his heart.

We compose a theme upon "love" and dedicate it to any suitable
young woman the colour of whose eyes suits the turn of our
metaphors. He loved first and wrote poetry afterwards--as the
occasion demanded.

That is why his love-poetry is so full of vibrant sincerity, so rich in
blood, so natural, so careless, so sentimental.

That is why there is a sort of conversational ease about his
love-poetry, and here and there lapses into what, to an artistic sense,
might seem bathos, absurdity, or rhetoric. Lovers are always a little
absurd; and the fear of absurdity is not a sign of deep feeling but of
the absence of all feeling.

Every one of Byron's most magnificent love-lyrics has its actual
circumstantial cause and impulse in the adventures of his life. He
does not spin out vague wordy platonic rhapsodies upon love-in-general.
He addresses a particular person, just