ction for the sire.

Byron helped to clear the air of this. His fire, his lofty spaciousness
of outlook, his spirited interest in great national causes, his romance,
and the passion both of his animosity and his sympathy, acted for a
while like an electric current, and every one within his influence
became ashamed to barter the large heritage of manhood, with its many
realms and illimitable interests, for the sordid ease of the hearth and
the good word of the unworthy. He fills men with thoughts that shake
down the unlovely temple of comfort. This was good, to force whoever was
not already too far sunk into the mire, high up to the larger
atmosphere, whence they could see how minute an atom is man, how
infinite and blind and pitiless the might that encompasses his little
life. Many feeble spirits ran back homewards from the horrid solitudes
and abysses of _Manfred_, and the moral terrors of _Cain_, and even the
despair of _Harold_, and, burying themselves in warm domestic places,
were comforted by the familiar restoratives and appliances. Firmer souls
were not only exhilarated, but intoxicated by the potent and
unaccustomed air. They went too far. They made war on the family, and
the idea of it. Everything human was mischievously dwarfed, and the
difference between right and wrong, between gratification of appetite
and its control for virtue's sake, between the acceptance and the
evasion of clear obligation, all became invisible or of no account in
the new light. That constancy and permanence, of which the family is the
type, and which is the first condition alike of the stability and
progress of society, was obliterated from thought. As if the wonders
that have been wrought by this regulated constancy of the feeling of man
for man in transforming human life were not far more transcendently
exalting than the contemplation of those glories of brute nature, which
are barbaric in comparison.

It would be unjust not to admit that there are abundant passages in his
poems of too manifest depth and sincerity of feeling, for us to suppose
that Byron himself was dead to the beauty of domestic sentiment. The
united tenderness and dignity of Faliero's words to Angiolina, before he
goes to the meeting of the conspirators, would, if there were nothing
else, be enough to show how rightly in his better moods the poet
appreciated the conditions of the family. Unfortunately the better moods
were not fixed, and we had _Don Juan_, where