Childe there are careless lines, and doubtful images.  “Self-exiled Harold wanders forth again,” looking “pale and interesting;” but we are soon refreshed by a higher note.  No familiarity can distract from “Waterloo,” which holds its own by Barbour’s “Bannockburn,” and Scott’s “Flodden.”  Sir Walter, referring to the climax of the opening, and the pathetic lament of the closing lines, generously doubts whether any verses in English surpass them in vigour.  There follows “The Broken Mirror,” extolled by Jeffrey with an appreciation of its exuberance of fancy, and negligence of diction; and then the masterly sketch of Napoleon, with the implied reference to the writer at the end.

The descriptions in both cantos perpetually rise from a basis of rhetoric to a real height of poetry.  Byron’s “Rhine” flows, like the river itself, in a stream of “exulting and abounding” stanzas.  His “Venice” may be set beside the masterpieces of Ruskin’s prose.  They are together the joint pride of Italy and England.  The tempest in the third canto is in verse a splendid microcosm of the favourites, if not the prevailing mood, of the writer’s mind.  In spite of manifest flaws, the nine stanzas beginning “It is the hush of night,” have enough in them to feed a high reputation.  The poet’s dying day, his sun and moon contending over the Rhaetian hill, his Thrasymene, Clitumnus, and Velino, show that his eye has grown keener, and his imagery at least more terse, and that he can occasionally forgot himself in his surroundings.  The Drachenfels, Ehrenbreitstein, the Alps, Lake Leman, pass before us like a series of dissolving views.  But the stability of the book depends on its being a Temple of Fame, as well as a Diorama of Scenery.  It is no mere versified Guide, because every resting-place in the pilgrimage is made interesting by association with illustrious memories.  Coblontz introduces the tribute to Marceau; Clarens an almost complete review, in five verses, of Rousseau; Lausanne and Ferney the quintessence of criticism on Gibbon and Voltaire.  A tomb in Arqua suggests Petrarch; the grass-grown streets of Ferrara lead in the lines on Tasso; the white walls of the Etrurian Athens bring back Alfieri and Michael Angelo, and the prose bard of the hundred tales, and Dante, “buried by the upbraiding shore,” and—­

  The starry Galileo and his woes.

Byron has made himself so master of the glories and the wrecks of Rome, that almost everything else that has been said of them seems superfluous.  Hawthorne, in his Marble Fawn, comes nearest to him; but Byron’s Gladiator and Apollo, if not his Laocoon, are unequalled.  “The voice of Marius,” says Scott, “could not sound more deep and solemn among the ruins of Carthage, than the strains of the pilgrim among the broken shrines and fallen statues of her subduer.”  As the third canto has a fitting close with the poet’s pathetic remembrance of his daughter, so the fourth is wound up with consummate art,—­the memorable dirge on the Princess Charlotte being followed by the address to the sea, which, enduring unwrinkled through all its ebbs and flows, seems to mock at the mutability of human life.