ich kept him substantially straight,
real, and human, and made him the genuine exponent of that immense
social movement which we sum up as the Revolution. If Keats's whole soul
was absorbed by sensuous impressions of the outer world, and his art was
the splendid and exquisite reproduction of these; if Shelley on the
other hand distilled from the fine impressions of the senses by process
of inmost meditation some thrice ethereal essence, 'the viewless spirit
of a lovely sound;' we may say of Byron that, even in the moods when the
mightiness and wonder of nature had most effectually possessed
themselves of his imagination, his mind never moved for very long on
these remote heights, apart from the busy world of men, but returned
again like the fabled dove from the desolate void of waters to the ark
of mortal stress and human passion. Nature, in her most dazzling
aspects or stupendous parts, is but the background and theatre of the
tragedy of man.

We may find a secondary proof of this in the fewness of those fine
descriptive strokes and subtle indirect touches of colour or sound which
arise with incessant spontaneity, where a mastering passion for nature
steeps the mind in vigilant, accurate, yet half-unconscious,
observation. It is amazing through how long a catalogue of natural
objects Byron sometimes takes us, without affixing to one of them any
but the most conventional term, or a single epithet which might show
that in passing through his mind it had yielded to him a beauty or a
savour that had been kept a secret from the common troop. Byron is
certainly not wanting in commanding image, as when Manfred likens the
lines of foaming light flung along from the Alpine cataract to 'the pale
courser's tail, the giant steed, to be bestrode by Death.' But
imaginative power of this kind is not the same thing as that
susceptibility to the minutest properties and unseen qualities of
natural objects which reveals itself in chance epithet of telling
felicity, or phrase that opens to us hidden lights. Our generation is
more likely to think too much than too little of this; for its favourite
poet, however narrow in subject and feeble in moral treatment, is
without any peer in the exquisitely original, varied, and imaginative
art of his landscape touches.

This treatment of nature was in exact harmony with the method of
revolutionary thought, which, from the time of Rousseau downwards, had
appealed in its profound weariness of an ex