sed Campbell the poet to say:

"If the love of Juan and Haidee is not pure and innocent, and expressed
with delicacy and propriety, then may we at once condemn and blot out
this tender passion of the soul from the list of a poet's themes. Then
must we shut our eyes and harden our hearts against that passion which
sways our whole existence, and quite become mere creatures of hypocrisy
and formality, and accuse Milton himself of madness."

At Ravenna, where Lord Byron composed so many sublime works, he also
wrote "Sardanapalus" and "Heaven and Earth." He was then thirty-two
years of age. The love predominating in these two dramas is that which
swayed his own soul, the same sentiment which, a year later, also
inspired the beautiful poem composed on his way from Ravenna to Pisa.

No quotation could convey an idea of the noble energetic feeling
animating these two dramas, for adequate language is wanting; impervious
to words, the sentiment they contain is like a spirit pervading, or a
ray of light warming and illuminating them.

They require to be read throughout. I prefer to quote his words on love,
in the 16th canto of "Don Juan," and in "The Island," because they are
the last traced by his pen. Written a few days previous to his fatal
departure for Greece, it can not be doubted that the sentiment which
dictated them was the same that accompanied him to his last hour.

CVII.

* * * * * * *
"And certainly Aurora had renew'd
In him some feelings he had lately lost,
Or harden'd; feelings which, perhaps ideal,
Are so divine, that I must deem them real:--

CVIII.

"The love of higher things and better days;
The unbounded hope, and heavenly ignorance
Of what is call'd the world, and the world's ways;
The moments when we gather from a glance
More joy than from all future pride or praise,
Which kindle manhood, but can ne'er entrance
The heart in an existence of its own,
Of which another's bosom is the zone."[50]

And then, in describing the happiness of two lovers, in his poem of "The
Island," a few days before setting out for Greece, he says again:--

"Like martyrs revel in their funeral pyre,
With such devotion to their ecstasy,
That life knows no such rapture as to die;
And die they do; for earthly life has naught
Match'd with that burst of nature, even in thought;
And all our dreams of better life above
But close in one eternal gush of