d 'Greece and Italy wept for his death, as it had been
that of the noblest of their own sons.' Detractors have done their best
to pare away the merit of this act of self-renunciation by attributing
it to despair. That contemporaries of their own humour had done their
best to make his life a load to him is true, yet to this talk of despair
we may reply in the poet's own words:

When we know
All that can come, and how to meet it, our
Resolves, if firm, may merit a more noble
Word than this, to give it utterance.

There was an estimate of the value and purpose of a human life, which
our Age of Comfort may fruitfully ponder.

To fix upon violent will and incessant craving for movement as the mark
of a poet, whose contemporaries adored him for what they took to be the
musing sweetness of his melancholy, may seem a critical perversity.
There is, however, a momentous difference between that melancholy, which
is as the mere shadow projected by a man's spiritual form, and that
other melancholy, which itself is the reality and substance of a
character; between the soul to whom dejection brings graceful relief
after labour and effort, and the soul which by irresistible habit and
constitution dwells ever in Golgotha. This deep and penetrating
subjective melancholy had no possession of Byron. His character was
essentially objective, stimulated by outward circumstance, moving to
outward harmonies, seeking colour and image and purpose from without.
Hence there is inevitably a certain liveliness and animation, even when
he is in the depths. We feel that we are watching clouds sweep
majestically across the sky, and, even when they are darkest, blue
interspaces are not far off. Contrast the moodiest parts of _Childe
Harold_ or of _Cain_ with Novalis's _Night Hymns_. Byron's gloom is a
mere elegance in comparison. The one pipes to us with a graceful
despondency on the edge of the gulf, while the other carries us actually
down into the black profound, with no rebellious cry, nor shriek of woe,
but sombrely awaiting the deliverance of death, with soul absorbed and
consumed by weariness. Let the reader mark the note of mourning struck
in the opening stanzas, for instance, of Novalis's _Longing after
Death_, their simplicity, homeliness, transparent sincerity, and then
turn to any of the familiar passages where Byron meditates on the good
things which the end brings to men. How artificial he seems, and
unseasonably orn