otherwise cooerdinate, will receive illustration from a comparison between De Quincey and Byron.  For both these writers were capable, in a degree rarely equalled in any literature, of reproducing, or rather, we should say, of reconstructing, the pomp of Nature and of human life.  In this general office they stand together:  both wear, in our eyes, the regal purple; both have caused to rise between earth and heaven miracles of grandeur, such as never Cheops wrought through his myriad slaves, or Solomon with his fabled ring.  But in the final result, as in the whole modus operandi, of their architecture, they stand apart toto coelo.  Byron builds a structure that repeats certain elements in Nature or humanity; but they are those elements only which are allied to gloom, for he builds in suspicion and distrust, and upon the basis of a cynicism that has been nurtured in his very flesh and blood from birth; he erects a Pisa-like tower which overhangs and threatens all human hopes and all that is beautiful in human love.  Who else, save this archangelic intellect, shut out by a mighty shadow of eclipse from the bright hopes and warm affections of all sunny hearts, could have originated such a Pandemonian monster as the poem on “Darkness”?  The most striking specimen of Byron’s imaginative power, and nearly the most striking that has ever been produced, is the apostrophe to the sea, in “Childe Harold.”  But what is it in the sea which affects Lord Byron’s susceptibilities to grandeur?  Its destructiveness alone.  And how?  Is it through any high moral purpose or meaning that seems to sway the movements of destruction?  No; it is only through the gloomy mystery of the ruin itself,—­ruin revealed upon a scale so vast and under conditions of terror the most appalling,—­ruin wrought under the semblance of an almighty passion for revenge directed against the human race.  Thus, as an expression of the attitude which the sea maintains toward man, we have the following passage of AEschylian grandeur, but also of AEschylian gloom:—­

                                “Thou dost arise
  And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields
  For earth’s destruction thou dost all despise,
  Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,
  And send’st him, shivering in thy playful spray,
  And howling, to his gods, where haply lies
  His petty hope in some near port or bay,
  And dashest him again to earth:  there let him lay!”

Who but this dark spirit, forever wooing the powers of darkness, and of darkness the most sullen, praying to Nemesis alone, could, with such lamentable lack of faith in the purity and soundness of human affections, have given utterance to a sentiment like this:—­

  “O love! no habitant of earth thou art,—­
  An unseen seraph we believe in thee”?

or the following:—­

  “Who loves, raves,—­’tis youth’s frenzy,” etc.?