subsided; even as the tide of moss-troopers,
sorcerers, hermits, and feudal castles had already had its rise and
fall.

But there was a deeper reason for the impression made by Byron's poetry
upon his contemporaries. He laid his finger right on the sore spot in
modern life. He had the disease with which the time was sick, the
world-weariness, the desperation which proceeded from "passion incapable
of being converted into action." We find this tone in much of the
literature which followed the failure of the French Revolution and the
Napoleonic wars. From the irritations of that period, the disappointment
of high hopes for the future of the race, the growing religious
disbelief, and the revolt of democracy and free thought against
conservative reaction, sprang what Southey called the "Satanic school,"
which spoke its loudest word in Byron. Titanic is the better word, for
the rebellion was not against God, but Jupiter; that is, against the
State, Church, and society of Byron's day; against George III., the Tory
cabinet of Lord Castlereagh, the Duke of Wellington, the bench of
bishops, London gossip, the British constitution, and British cant. In
these poems of Byron, and in his dramatic experiments, _Manfred_ and
_Cain_, there is a single figure--the figure of Byron under various
masks--and one pervading mood, a restless and sardonic gloom, a
weariness of life, a love of solitude, and a melancholy exaltation in
the presence of the wilderness and the sea. Byron's hero is always
represented as a man originally noble, whom some great wrong, by others,
or some mysterious crime of his own, has blasted and embittered, and who
carries about the world a seared heart and a somber brow. Harold--who
may stand as a type of all his heroes--has run "through sin's
labyrinth," and feeling the "fullness of satiety," is drawn abroad to
roam, "the wandering exile of his own dark mind." The loss of a
capacity for pure, unjaded emotion is the constant burden of Byron's
lament;

No more, no more, O never more on me
The freshness of the heart shall fall like dew:

and again,

O could I feel as I have felt--or be what I have been,
Or weep as I could once have wept, o'er many a vanished scene;
As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish tho' they be,
So, midst the withered waste of life, those tears would flow to me.

This mood was sincere in Byron; but by cultivating it, and posing too
long in one attitude, he became s