of Byron's _Ode on the Fall of Bonaparte_?
'_L'audace, l'audace, et toujours l'audace._' If Danton could have read
Byron, he would have felt as one in front of a magician's glass. Every
passion and fit, from the bloody days of September down to the gloomy
walks by the banks of the Aube, and the prison-cry that 'it were better
to be a poor fisherman than to meddle with the governing of men,' would
have found itself there. It is true that in Byron we miss the firmness
of noble and generous hope. This makes him a more veritable embodiment
of the Revolution than such a precursor as Rousseau, in whom were all
the unclouded anticipations of a dawn, that opened to an obscured noon
and a tempestuous night. Yet one knows not, in truth, how much of that
violence of will and restless activity and resolute force was due less
to confidence, than to the urgent necessity which every one of us has
felt, at some season and under some influence, of filling up spiritual
vacuity by energetic material activity. Was this the secret of the
mysterious charm that scenes of violent strife and bloodshed always had
for Byron's imagination, as it was perhaps the secret of the black
transformation of the social faith of '89 into the worship of the
Conqueror of '99? Nowhere does Byron's genius show so much of its own
incomparable fire and energy, nor move with such sympathetic firmness
and amplitude of pinion, as in _Lara_, the _Corsair_, _Harold_, and
other poems, where 'Red Battle stamps his foot,' and where

The giant on the mountain stands,
His blood-red tresses deep'ning in the sun,
With death-shot glowing in his fiery hands,
And eye that scorcheth all it glows upon.

Yet other and intrinsically nobler passages, where this splendid
imaginative energy of the sensations is replaced by the calmer glow of
social meditation, prove that Byron was penetrated with the
distinctively modern scorn and aversion for the military spirit, and the
distinctively modern conviction of its being the most deadly of
anachronisms. Such indirect satisfaction to the physical energies was to
him, as their direct satisfaction was to the disillusioned France of
'99, the relief demanded by a powerful nature for the impotence of hope
and vision.

However this may have been, it may be confessed that Byron presents less
of the flame of his revolutionary prototypes, and too much of the ashes.
He came at the end of the experiment. But it is only a question of
propo