Nor need I to repine
That all those charms have passed away,
I might have watched through long decay.'

There is no novelty in the ideas, nor does he open the deeper vein of
thoughts that touch the mind with a sense of mortality. Yet the verse
has a masculine brevity that renders effectively the attitude in which
men may well be content firmly to confront an irreparable misfortune.

In his poems of strenuous action, although Byron has not the rare
quality of heroic simplicity, he could at times strike a high
vibrating war note, and could interpret romantically the patriotic
spirit. The two stanzas which we quote from the Hebrew Melodies show
that he could now and then shake off the redundant metaphors and
epithets that overload too much of his impetuous verse, and use his
strength freely:

'Though thou art fall'n, while we are free
Thou shalt not taste of death!
The generous blood that flowed from thee
Disdained to sink beneath;
Within our veins its currents be,
Thy spirit on our breath.

'Thy name, our charging hosts along,
Shall be their battle word!
Thy fall, the theme of choral song
From virgin voices poured!
To weep would do thy glory wrong;
Thou shalt not be deplored.'

And we have another magnificent example of Byron's lyrical power in
the _Isles of Greece_, where the two lines,

'Ah, no! the voices of the dead
Sound like a distant torrent's fall,'

drop suddenly into the elegiac strain, into a mournful echo that
dwells upon the ear, followed by the rising note of a call to arms. It
must be remembered that nothing is so rare as a stirring war-song, and
that in our time we have had a good many attempts--almost all
failures; whereas the _Isles of Greece_ will long continue to stir the
masculine imagination of Englishmen.

On the other hand, it must be admitted that Byron's Occasional Pieces
abound with cheap pathos, dubious fervour, and a kind of commonplace
sentimentality that comes out in the form as well as in the feeling of
his inferior work. The rhymes are apt to be hackneyed, the similes are
sometimes tagged on awkwardly instead of being weaved into the
texture, the expression has often lost its strength, and the emotion
lacks sincerity. Byron, like his brother poets, wrote copiously what
was published indiscriminately; but if the first-class work had not
been very good it would never have buoyed up above sheer obli