as Burns did--just as
Shakespeare did--and his poems are, so to speak, thrilled with the
excitement of the great moment's tumultuous pulses, scalded with
the heat of its passionate tears.

These moments pass, of course. One need not be derisively cynical
over that. Infatuation succeeds infatuation. Dream succeeds dream.
The loyalty of a life-long love was not his. His life ended indeed
before youth's desperate experiments were over, before the reaction
set in. But the sterner mood had begun.

"Tread these reviving passions down,
Unworthy manhood. Unto thee
Indifferent should the smile or frown
Of Beauty be."

And the lines end--his last--with that stoical resignation in the
presence of a soldier's fate which gives to the close of his
adventurous enterprise on behalf of an oppressed Hellenic world
such a gallant dignity.

"Then look around and choose thy ground,
And take thy rest."

If these proud personal touches, of which there are so many
scattered through his work, offend our artistic modern sense we
must remember that the same tone, the same individual confession
of quite personal emotion, is to be found in Dante and Milton and
Goethe.

The itching mock-modesty of the intellectual altruist, ashamed to
commit himself to the personal note, is not an indication of a great
nature. It is rather a sign of a fussy self-consciousness under the eyes
of impertinent criticism.

What drives the modern philosopher to jeer at Byron is really a sort
of envy of his splendid and irresponsible personality, that
personality whose demonic energy is so radiant with the beautiful
glamour of youth.

And what superb strength and high romance there are in certain of
his verses when the magnificent anger of the moment has its way
with him!

Fill high the bowl with Samian wine!
On Suli's rock and Parga's shore
Exists the remnant of a line
Such as our Doric mothers bore--

No one can help confessing that poetry of this kind, "simple,
sensuous and passionate"--to use the great Miltonic definition--possesses,
for all its undeniable _rhetoric,_ a large and high poetic value.

And at its best, the poetry of Byron is not mere rhetoric. Rhetoric
undoubtedly is there. His mind was constantly, like most simple
minds when touched to large issues, betrayed by the sweet treachery
of rhetoric; but I feel confident that any really subtle critic of the
delicate differences betwe