was a relation of exact sympathy. He felt the force of
each of the many currents that united in one destructive stream, wildly
overflowing the fixed banks, and then, when it had overflowed, often, it
must be confessed, stagnating in lazy brackish pools, while new
tributaries began to flow in together from far other quarters. The list
of his poems is the catalogue of the elements of the revolutionary
spirit. For of what manner is this spirit? Is it not a masterful and
impatient yearning after many good things, unsubdued and uninformed
either by a just knowledge of the time, and the means which are needed
to bring to men the fruits of their hope, or by a fit appreciation of
orderly and tranquil activity for the common service, as the normal type
of the individual life? And this is precisely the temper and the spirit
of Byron. Nowhere else do we see drawn in such traits that colossal
figure, which has haunted Europe these fourscore years and more, with
its new-born passion, its half-controlled will, its constant cry for a
multitude of unknown blessings under the single name of Freedom, the one
known and unadulterated word of blessing. If only Truth, which alone of
words is essentially divine and sacrosanct, had been the chief talisman
of the Revolution, the movement would have been very different from that
which we know. But to claim this or that in the name of truth, would
have been to borrow the language which priests and presbyters, Dominic
and Calvin, had covered thick with hateful associations. Freedom, after
all, was the next best thing, for it is an indispensable condition of
the best of all; but it could not lead men until the spirit of truth,
which means science in the intellectual order, and justice in the social
order, had joined company with it.

So there was violent action in politics, and violent and excessive
stimulation in literature, the positive effects of the force moved in
each sphere being deplorably small in proportion to the intense moral
energy which gave the impulse. In literature the straining for mental
liberty was the more futile of the two, because it expressed the ardent
and hopeless longing of the individual for a life which we may perhaps
best call life unconditioned. And this unconditioned life, which the
Byronic hero vainly seeks, and not finding, he fills the world with
stormy complaint, is least of all likely to offer itself in any
approximate form to men penetrated with gross and egotist