rties
before our eyes, to go in quest of any very remote or mysterious reasons
to account for it."

After observing that men of great genius have never seemed made for
domestic happiness, through certain habits, certain wants of their
nature, and certain faults, which appear, he says, like the shade thrown
by genius in proportion to its greatness, Moore adds that Lord Byron
still was, in many respects, _a singular exception to this rule_, for
his heart was so sensitive and his passions so ardent, that the world of
reality never ceased to hold a large place in his sympathies; that for
the rest, his imagination could never usurp the place of reality,
neither in his feelings nor in the objects exciting them.

"The poet in Lord Byron," says Moore, "never absorbed the man. From this
very mixture has it arisen that his pages bear so deeply the stamp of
real life, and that in the works of no poet with the exception of
Shakspeare, can every various mood of the mind--whether solemn or gay,
whether inclined to the ludicrous or the sublime, whether seeking to
divert itself with the follies of society or panting after the grandeur
of solitary nature--find so readily a strain of sentiment in accordance
with its every passing tone."

Nevertheless he did not completely escape the usual fate of great
geniuses, since he also experienced, though rarely, and always with good
cause, that sadness which, as Shakspeare says,--

"Sicklies the face of happiness itself."

"To these faults, and sources of faults, inherent in his own sensitive
nature, he added also many of those which a long indulgence of self-will
generates--the least compatible, of all others, with that system of
mutual concession and sacrifice by which the balance of domestic peace
is maintained. In him they were softened down by good-nature. When we
look back, indeed, to the unbridled career, of which this marriage was
meant to be the goal--to the rapid and restless course in which his life
had run along, like a burning train, through a series of wanderings,
adventures, successes, and passions, the fever of all which was still
upon him, when, with the same headlong recklessness, he rushed into
this marriage, it can but little surprise us that, in the space of one
short year, he should not have been able to recover all at once from his
bewilderment, or to settle down into that _tame level_ of conduct which
the close observers of his every action required. As well might