both wear, in our eyes, the regal
purple; both have caused to rise between earth and heaven miracles of
grandeur, such as never Cheops wrought through his myriad slaves, or
Solomon with his fabled ring. But in the final result, as in the whole
_modus operandi_, of their architecture, they stand apart _toto coelo_.
Byron builds a structure that repeats certain elements in Nature or
humanity; but they are those elements only which are allied to gloom,
for he builds in suspicion and distrust, and upon the basis of a
cynicism that has been nurtured in his very flesh and blood from birth;
he erects a Pisa-like tower which overhangs and threatens all human
hopes and all that is beautiful in human love. Who else, save this
archangelic intellect, shut out by a mighty shadow of eclipse from the
bright hopes and warm affections of all sunny hearts, could have
originated such a Pandemonian monster as the poem on "Darkness"? The
most striking specimen of Byron's imaginative power, and nearly the most
striking that has ever been produced, is the apostrophe to the sea, in
"Childe Harold." But what is it in the sea which affects Lord Byron's
susceptibilities to grandeur? Its destructiveness alone. And _how_? Is
it through any high moral purpose or meaning that seems to sway the
movements of destruction? No; it is only through the gloomy mystery of
the ruin itself,--ruin revealed upon a scale so vast and under
conditions of terror the most appalling,--ruin wrought under the
semblance of an almighty passion for revenge directed against the human
race. Thus, as an expression of the attitude which the sea maintains
toward man, we have the following passage of AEschylian grandeur, but
also of AEschylian gloom:--

"Thou dost arise
And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields
For earth's destruction thou dost all despise,
Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,
And send'st him, shivering in thy _playful_ spray,
And howling, to his gods, where haply lies
His petty hope in some near port or bay,
And dashest him again to earth: there let him lay!"

Who but this dark spirit, forever wooing the powers of darkness, and of
darkness the most sullen, praying to Nemesis alone, could, with such
lamentable lack of faith in the purity and soundness of human
affections, have given utterance to a sentiment like this:--

"O love! no habitant of earth thou art,--
An _unseen_ seraph we believe i