ess and beauty all the provinces of their
otherwise too desolate existence. In a word, they willed one thing, to
which all other things were subordinated and made subservient, and
therefore they accomplished it. The wedge will rend rocks, but its
edge must be sharp and single: if it be double the wedge is bruised.

Doubtless there was a remedy for this perverseness, but not in
others--only in himself; least of all in simple increase of wealth and
worldly "respectability." We hope we have now heard enough about the
efficacy of wealth for poetry and to make poets happy. Nay, have we
not seen another instance of it in these very days? Byron, a man of an
endowment considerably less ethereal than that of Burns, is born in
the rank not of a Scottish ploughman, but of an English peer: the
highest worldly honors, the fairest worldly career, are his by
inheritance: the richest harvest of fame he soon reaps, in another
province, by his own hand. And what does all this avail him? Is he
happy, is he good, is he true? Alas, he has a poet's soul, and strives
toward the infinite and the eternal; and soon feels that all this is
but mounting to the housetop to reach the stars! Like Burns, he is
only a proud man; might, like him, have "purchased a pocket-copy of
Milton to study the character of Satan"; for Satan also is Byron's
grand exemplar, the hero of his poetry, and the model apparently of
his conduct. As in Burns's case, too, the celestial element will not
mingle with the clay of earth; both poet and man of the world he must
not be; vulgar ambition will not live kindly with poetic adoration; he
_cannot_ serve God and Mammon. Byron, like Burns, is not happy; nay,
he is the most wretched of all men. His life is falsely arranged: the
fire that is in him is not a strong, still, central fire, warming into
beauty the products of a world, but it is the mad fire of a volcano;
and now--we look sadly into the ashes of a crater, which, erelong,
will fill itself with snow!

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 46: From the "History of the French Revolution."]

[Footnote 47: Jean Paul Marat, a physician, was the most radical of
the Jacobins and had been a leader in the overthrow of the Girondists
on June 2, 1793. He was assassinated by Charlotte Corday on July 18 of
the same year.]

[Footnote 48: From "Past and Present."]

[Footnote 49: From "Heroes and Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in
History."]

[Footnote 50: From "Sartor Resartus."]

[Footnote 51