et with on the
threshold of this boyish enterprise but confirmed him in his first
paradoxical views of human ills and their remedies; and, instead of
waiting to take lessons of authority and experience, he, with a courage,
admirable had it been but wisely directed, made war upon both. From this
sort of self-willed start in the world, an impulse was at once given to
his opinions and powers directly contrary, it would seem, to their
natural bias, and from which his life was too short to allow him time to
recover. With a mind, by nature, fervidly pious, he yet refused to
acknowledge a Supreme Providence, and substituted some airy abstraction
of "Universal Love" in its place. An aristocrat by birth and, as I
understand, also in appearance and manners, he was yet a leveller in
politics, and to such an Utopian extent as to be, seriously, the
advocate of a community of property. With a delicacy and even romance of
sentiment, which lends such grace to some of his lesser poems, he could
notwithstanding contemplate a change in the relations of the sexes,
which would have led to results fully as gross as his arguments for it
were fastidious and refined; and though benevolent and generous to an
extent that seemed to exclude all idea of selfishness, he yet scrupled
not, in the pride of system, to disturb wantonly the faith of his
fellowmen, and, without substituting any equivalent good in its place,
to rob the wretched of a hope, which, even if false, would be worth all
this world's best truths.

Upon no point were the opposite tendencies of the two friends,--to
long-established opinions and matter of fact on one side, and to all
that was most innovating and visionary on the other,--more observable
than in their notions on philosophical subjects; Lord Byron being, with
the great bulk of mankind, a believer in the existence of Matter and
Evil, while Shelley so far refined upon the theory of Berkeley as not
only to resolve the whole of Creation into spirit, but to add also to
this immaterial system some pervading principle, some abstract
non-entity of Love and Beauty, of which--as a substitute, at least, for
Deity--the philosophic bishop had never dreamed. On such subjects, and
on poetry, their conversation generally turned; and, as might be
expected, from Lord Byron's facility in receiving new impressions, the
opinions of his companion were not altogether without some influence on
his mind. Here and there, among those fine bursts of