As to the spirit of “Childe Harold,” it is not satirical; it is more pensive than bitter, and reveals the loneliness and sorrows of an unsatisfied soul,—­the unrest of a pilgrim in search for something new.  It seeks to penetrate the secrets of struggling humanity, at war often with those certitudes which are the consolation of our inner life.  It everywhere recognizes the soul as that which gives greatest dignity to man.  It invokes love as the noblest joy of life.  The poem is one of the most ideal of human productions, soaring beyond what is material and transient.  It is not religious, not reverential, not Christian, like the “Divine Comedy” and the “Paradise Lost;” and yet it is lofty, aspiring, exulting in what is greatest in deed or song, destined to immortality of fame and admiration.  It is a confession, indirectly, of the follies and shortcomings of the author, and of their retribution, but complains not of the Nemesis that avenges everything.  It is sensitive of wrongs and injustices and misrepresentations, but does not hurl anathemas,—­speaking in sorrow rather than in anger, except in regard to hypocrisies and shams and lies, when its scorn is intense and terrible.

The whole poem is brilliant and original, but does not flash like fire in a dark night.  It was written with the heart’s blood, and is as earnest as it is penetrating.  It does not ascend to the higher mysteries forever veiled from mortal eye, nor descend to the deepest depths of hatred and despair, but confines itself to those passions which have marked gifted mortals, and those questionings in which all thoughtful minds have ever delighted.  It does not make revelations like “Hamlet” or “Macbeth;” it does not explore secrets hidden forever from ordinary minds, like “Faust;” but it muses and meditates on what Fate and Time have brought to pass,—­such events as have been revealed in history.  It invokes the neglected but impressive monuments of antiquity to tell the tales of glory and of shame.  In moral wisdom it is vastly inferior to Shakspeare, and it is not rich in those wise and striking lines which pass into the proverbs of the world; but it has the glow of a poetic soul, longing for fame, craving love, and not unmindful of immortality.  Its most beautiful stanzas are full of tenderness and sadness for lost or unrequited affections; of reproachless sorrow for broken friendships, in which the soul would fain have lived but for inconsistencies and contradictions which made true and permanent love impossible.  The poem paints a paradise lost, rather than a paradise regained.  I wonder at its popularity, for it seems to me too deep and learned for popular appreciation, except in those stanzas where pathos or enthusiasm, expressed in matchless language, appeal to the heart and soul.

Of all modern poets, Byron is the most human and outspoken, daring to say what many would fear or blush to meditate upon.  He fearlessly reveals the infirmities and audacities of a double and mysterious nature, made up of dust and deity, now grovelling in the mire, then borne aloft to the skies,—­the football of the eternal powers of good and evil, enslaved and yet to be emancipated, as we may hope, in the last and final struggle, when the soul is rescued by Omnipotence.