My days are in the yellow leaf,
    The flowers and fruits of love are gone: 
    The worm, the canker, and the grief
        Are mine alone.

WORKS OF BYRON.  In reading Byron it is well to remember that he was a disappointed and embittered man, not only in his personal life, but also in his expectation of a general transformation of human society.  As he pours out his own feelings, chiefly, in his poetry, he is the most expressive writer of his age in voicing the discontent of a multitude of Europeans who were disappointed at the failure of the French Revolution to produce an entirely new form of government and society.

One who wishes to understand the whole scope of Byron’s genius and poetry will do well to begin with his first work, Hours of Idleness, written when he was a young man at the university.  There is very little poetry in the volume, only a striking facility in rime, brightened by the devil-may-care spirit of the Cavalier poets; but as a revelation of the man himself it is remarkable.  In a vain and sophomoric preface he declares that poetry is to him an idle experiment, and that this is his first and last attempt to amuse himself in that line.  Curiously enough, as he starts for Greece on his last, fatal journey, he again ridicules literature, and says that the poet is a “mere babbler.”  It is this despising of the art which alone makes him famous that occasions our deepest disappointment.  Even in his magnificent passages, in a glowing description of nature or of a Hindoo woman’s exquisite love, his work is frequently marred by a wretched pun, or by some cheap buffoonery, which ruins our first splendid impression of his poetry.

Byron’s later volumes, Manfred and Cain, the one a curious, and perhaps unconscious, parody of Faust, the other of Paradise Lost, are his two best known dramatic works.  Aside from the question of their poetic value, they are interesting as voicing Byron’s excessive individualism and his rebellion against society.  The best known and the most readable of Byron’s works Mazeppa, The Prisoner of Chillon, and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.  The first two cantos of Childe Harold (1812) are perhaps more frequently read than any other work of the same author, partly because of their melodious verse, partly because of their descriptions of places along the lines of European travel; but the last two cantos (1816-1818) written after his exile from England, have more sincerity, and are in every way better expressions of Byron’s mature genius.  Scattered through all his works one finds magnificent descriptions of natural scenery, and exquisite lyrics of love and despair; but they are mixed with such a deal of bombast and rhetoric, together with much that is unwholesome, that the beginner will do well to confine himself to a small volume of well-chosen selections.[227]