Once more upon the waters, etc.

He had a passion for night and storm, because they made him forget himself.

                            Most glorious night! 
  Thou wert not sent for slumber!  Let me be
  A sharer in thy fierce and far delight,
  A portion of the tempest and of thee!

Byron’s literary executor and biographer was the Irish poet, Thomas Moore, a born song-writer, whose Irish Melodies, set to old native airs, are, like Burns’s, genuine, spontaneous singing, and run naturally to music.  Songs such as the Meeting of the Waters, The Harp of Tara, Those Evening Bells, the Light of Other Days, Araby’s Daughter, and the Last Rose of Summer were, and still are, popular favorites.  Moore’s Oriental romance, Lalla Rookh, 1817, is overladen with ornament and with a sugary sentiment that clogs the palate.  He had the quick Irish wit, sensibility rather than passion, and fancy rather than imagination.

Byron’s friend, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), was also in fiery revolt against all conventions and institutions, though his revolt proceeded not, as in Byron’s case, from the turbulence of passions which brooked no restraint, but rather from an intellectual impatience of any kind of control.  He was not, like Byron, a sensual man, but temperate and chaste.  He was, indeed, in his life and in his poetry, as nearly a disembodied spirit as a human creature can be.  The German poet, Heine, said that liberty was the religion of this century, and of this religion Shelley was a worshiper.  His rebellion against authority began early.  He refused to fag at Eton, and was expelled from Oxford for publishing a tract on the Necessity of Atheism.  At nineteen, he ran away with Harriet Westbrook, and was married to her in Scotland.  Three years later he deserted her for Mary Godwin, with whom he eloped to Switzerland.  Two years after this his first wife drowned herself in the Serpentine, and Shelley was then formally wedded to Mary Godwin.  All this is rather startling, in the bare statement of it, yet it is not inconsistent with the many testimonies that exist to Shelley’s singular purity and beauty of character, testimonies borne out by the evidence of his own writings.  Impulse with him took the place of conscience.  Moral law, accompanied by the sanction of power, and imposed by outside authority, he rejected as a form of tyranny.  His nature lacked robustness and ballast.  Byron, who was at the bottom intensely practical, said that Shelley’s philosophy was too spiritual and romantic.  Hazlitt, himself a Radical, wrote of Shelley:  “He has a fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his speech, which mark out the philosophic fanatic.  He is sanguine-complexioned and shrill-voiced.”  It was, perhaps, with some recollection of this last-mentioned trait of Shelley the man, that Carlyle wrote of Shelley the poet, that “the sound of him was shrieky,” and that he had “filled the earth with an inarticulate wailing.”