A single deviation from the track
Of human duties leaves even those who claim
The homage of mankind as their born due!
The baldest writer of hymns might work up passion enough for a
consummation like this. Once more, Byron was insufficiently furnished
with positive intellectual ideas, and for want of these his most
exalted words were constantly left sterile of definite and pointed
outcome.
Byron's passionate feeling for mankind included the long succession of
generations, that stretch back into the past and lie far on in the misty
distances of the future. No poet has had a more sublime sense of the
infinite melancholy of history; indeed, we hardly feel how great a poet
Byron was, until we have read him at Venice, at Florence, and above all
in that overpowering scene where the 'lone mother of dead empires'
broods like a mysterious haunting spirit among the columns and arches
and wrecked fabrics of Rome. No one has expressed with such amplitude
the sentiment that in a hundred sacred spots of the earth has
Fill'd up
As 'twere, anew, the gaps of centuries;
Leaving that beautiful which still was so,
And making that which was not; till the place
Became religious, and the heart ran o'er
With silent worship of the great of old--
The dead, but sceptred sovereigns, who still rule
Our spirits from their urns.
Only he stands aright, who from his little point of present possession
ever meditates on the far-reaching lines, which pass through his point
from one interminable star-light distance to another. Neither the stoic
pagan, nor the disciple of the creed which has some of the peculiar
weakness of stoicism and not all its peculiar strength, could find
Manfred's latest word untrue to himself:
The mind, which is immortal, makes itself
Requital for its good or evil thoughts--
Is its own origin of ill and end,
And its own place and time: its innate sense,
When stripped of this mortality, derives
No colour from the fleeting things without:
But is absorbed in sufferance of joy,
Born from the knowledge of its own desert.
It is only when a man subordinates this absorption in individual
sufferance and joy to the thought that his life is a trust for humanity,
that he is sure of making it anything other than 'rain fallen on the
sand.' In the last great episode of his own career Byron was as lofty as
the noblest side of his creed. The historic feeling for the unseen
benefactors of old time was matched by vehemence of sympathy with the
struggles for liberation of his own day. And for this, history will not
forget him. Though he may have no place in our own Minster, he assuredly
belongs to the band of far-shining men, of whom Pericles declared the
whole world to be the tomb.
End of Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I, by John Morley