it was his fate to come
to town--modern town--like Michael's son; and modern London (and Venice)
are answerable for the state of their drains, not Byron.

Thirdly. His melancholy is without any relief whatsoever; his jest
sadder than his earnest; while, in Elizabethan work, all lament is full
of hope, and all pain of balsam.

Of this evil he has himself told you the cause in a single line,
prophetic of all things since and now. 'Where _he_ gazed, a gloom
pervaded space.'[196]

So that, for instance, while Mr. Wordsworth, on a visit to town, being
an exemplary early riser, could walk, felicitous, on Westminster Bridge,
remarking how the city now did like a garment wear the beauty of the
morning; Byron, rising somewhat later, contemplated only the garment
which the beauty of the morning had by that time received for wear from
the city: and again, while Mr. Wordsworth, in irrepressible religious
rapture, calls God to witness that the houses seem asleep, Byron, lame
demon as he was, flying smoke-drifted, unroofs the houses at a glance,
and sees what the mighty cockney heart of them contains in the still
lying of it, and will stir up to purpose in the waking business of it,

'The sordor of civilisation, mixed
With all the passions which Man's fall hath fixed.'[197]

Fourthly, with this steadiness of bitter melancholy, there is joined a
sense of the material beauty, both of inanimate nature, the lower
animals, and human beings, which in the iridescence, colour-depth, and
morbid (I use the word deliberately) mystery and softness of it,--with
other qualities indescribable by any single words, and only to be
analysed by extreme care,--is found, to the full, only in five men that
I know of in modern times; namely Rousseau, Shelley, Byron, Turner, and
myself,--differing totally and throughout the entire group of us, from
the delight in clear-struck beauty of Angelico and the Trecentisti; and
separated, much more singularly, from the cheerful joys of Chaucer,
Shakespeare, and Scott, by its unaccountable affection for 'Rokkes blak'
and other forms of terror and power, such as those of the ice-oceans,
which to Shakespeare were only Alpine rheum; and the Via Malas and
Diabolic Bridges which Dante would have condemned none but lost souls to
climb, or cross;--all this love of impending mountains, coiled
thunder-clouds, and dangerous sea, being joined in us with a sulky,
almost ferine, love of retreat in valleys of Charmett