of his poems wherein,
perhaps, reason may be said to be at fault, owing to the sickness under
which his soul labored at the time when it was written, and to his
diseased imagination, produced by solitude and unmerited grief. In his
lyrical poems Byron's soul must be sought. There he speaks and sings in
his own name, expresses his own sentiments, breathes his own thoughts;
or, again, in his elegies and in his miscellaneous poems, in his dramas,
in his mysteries, nay, even in his satires--the noble and courageous
independence of which has never been surpassed by any satirist, ancient
or modern--and generally in all the poems which he wrote in Italy, and
which might almost be called his second form. In these poems no medium
is any longer required between his soul and that of the reader. It is
not possible any longer to make any mistake about him in these. The
melancholy and the energy displayed in them can not serve any more to
give him the mask of a Conrad, or of a Harold, or of a misanthrope, or
of a haughty individual, but they place in relief what there is of
tender, amiable, affectionate sublime in those chosen beings whom God
occasionally sends upon earth to testify here below of the things
above:--

"Per far di colassu fede fra noi."--PETRARCH.

Thus, in his elegy upon the death of Thyrza, "far too beautiful," says
Moore, "and too pure to have been inspired by a mortal being," what
pathos, what sensitiveness! What charm in his sonnets to Guinevre! What
soft melancholy, what profound and intimate knowledge of the immortality
and spirituality of our soul, in his Hebrew melodies! "They seem as
though they had been inspired by Isaiah and written by Shakspeare," says
the Very Rev. Dr. Stanley, Dean of Westminster. What touching family
affection in his domestic poems, and what generosity in the avowal of
certain wrongs! What great and moral feeling pervade the two last cantos
of "Childe Harold," melancholy though they be, like all things which are
beautiful! How one feels that the pain they tell of has its origin in
unmerited persecution, and how his intellect came to his aid, and
enabled him to bear with calmness the uncertainties incident to our
nature! What greatness of soul in the forgiveness of what to others
would seem unpardonable! What love of humanity and of its rights! What
hatred of injustice, tyranny, and oppression in the "Ode to Venice," in
"The Lament of Tasso," in "The Prophecy of Dante," and in gener