s a meteoric rebel against the degrading servility of what we have
come to call the "Nonconformist Conscience" Byron must always
have his place in the tragically slow emancipation of the human
spirit. The reluctance of an ordinary sensitive modern person,
genuinely devoted to poetry, to spend any more time with Byron's
verses than what those great familiar lyrics printed in all the
anthologies exact, is merely a proof that he is not the poet that
Shelley, for instance, is.

It is a melancholy commentary upon the "immortality of genius" and
that "perishing only with the English language" of which
conventional orators make so much, that the case should be so; but it
is more important to be honest in the admission of our real feelings
than to flatter the pride of the human race.

The world moves on. Manners, customs, habits, moralities, ideals,
all change with changing of the times.

_Style alone,_ the imaginative rendering in monumental words of
the most personal secrets of our individuality, gives undying interest
to what men write. Sappho and Catullus, Villon and Marlowe, are as
vivid and fresh to-day as are Walter de la Mare or Edgar Lee
Masters.

If Byron can only thrill us with half-a-dozen little songs his
glory-loving ghost ought to be quite content.

To last in any form at all, as the generations pass and the face of the
planet alters, is a great and lucky accident. To last so that men not
only read you but love you when a century's dust covers your ashes
is a high and royal privilege.

To leave a name which, whether men read your work or not,
whether men love your memory or not, still conjures up an image of
strength and joy and courage and beauty, is a great reward.

To leave a name which must be associated for all time with the
human struggle to free itself from false idealism and false morality
is something beyond any reward. It is to have entered into the
creative forces of Nature herself. It is to have become a fatality. It is
to have merged your human, individual, personal voice with the
voices of _the elements which are beyond the elements._ It is to
have become an eternally living portion of that unutterable central
flame which, though the smoke of its burning may roll back upon us
and darken our path, is forever recreating the world.

Much of Byron's work, while he lived, was of necessity destructive.
Such destruction is part of the secret of life. In the world of moral
ideals destroyers have