tative of Byron's poems. It takes up into itself most fully the
life of the time; exhibits most thoroughly the characteristic
alternations of Byron's moods and the prodigal resources of wit, passion,
and understanding, which--rather than imagination--were his prominent
qualities as a poet. The hero, a graceless, amorous, stripling, goes
wandering from Spain to the Greek islands and Constantinople, thence to
St. Petersburg, and finally to England. Every-where his seductions are
successful, and Byron uses him as a means of exposing the weakness of the
human heart and the rottenness of society in all countries. In 1823,
breaking away from his life of selfish indulgence in Italy, Byron threw
himself into the cause of Grecian liberty, which he had sung so
gloriously in the _Isles of Greece_. He died at Missolonghi, in the
following year, of a fever contracted by exposure and overwork.

Byron was a great poet but not a great literary {255} artist. He wrote
negligently and with the ease of assured strength, his mind gathering
heat as it moved, and pouring itself forth in reckless profusion. His
work is diffuse and imperfect; much of it is melodrama or speech-making
rather than true poetry. But on the other hand, much, very much of it,
is unexcelled as the direct, strong, sincere utterance of personal
feeling. Such is the quality of his best lyrics, like _When We Two
Parted_, the _Elegy on Thyrza_, _Stanzas to Augusta_, _She Walks in
Beauty_, and of innumerable passages, lyrical and descriptive, in his
longer poems. He had not the wisdom of Wordsworth, nor the rich and
subtle imagination of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats when they were at
their best. But he had greater body and motive force than any of them.
He is the strongest personality among English poets since Milton, though
his strength was wasted by want of restraint and self-culture. In Milton
the passion was there, but it was held in check by the will and the
artistic conscience, made subordinate to good ends, ripened by long
reflection, and finally uttered in forms of perfect and harmonious
beauty. Byron's love of Nature was quite different in kind from
Wordsworth's. Of all English poets he has sung most lyrically of that
national theme, the sea, as witness among many other passages, the famous
apostrophe to the ocean, which closes _Childe Harold_, and the opening of
the third canto in the same poem,

"Once more upon the waters," etc.

{256} He had a