But how did the human race fare in this miserable time?

In his magnificent poem “Darkness,” Byron has imagined such a blind and darkling world as these legends depict; and he has imagined, too, the hunger, and the desolation, and the degradation of the time.

We are not to despise the imagination.  There never was yet a great thought that had not wings to it; there never was yet a great mind that did not survey things from above the mountain-tops.

If Bacon built the causeway over which modern science has advanced, it was because, mounting on the pinions of his magnificent imagination, he saw that poor struggling mankind needed such a pathway; his heart embraced humanity even as his brain embraced the universe.

The river which is a boundary to the rabbit, is but a landmark to the eagle.  Let not the gnawers of the world, the rodentia, despise the winged creatures of the upper air.

{p. 226}

Byron saw what the effects of the absence of the sunlight would necessarily be upon the world, and that which he prefigured the legends of mankind tell us actually came to pass, in the dark days that followed the Drift.

He says: 

     “Morn came, and went—­and came, and brought no day,
     And men forgot their passions in the dread
     Of this their desolation, and all hearts
     Were chilled into a selfish prayer for light. . . . 
     A fearful hope was all the world contained;
     Forests were set on fire—­but hour by hour
     They fell and faded,—­and the crackling trunks
     Extinguished with a crash,—­and all was black. 
     The brows of men by the despairing light
     Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
     The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
     And bid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
     Their chins upon their clinchèd hands and smiled;
     And others hurried to and fro, and fed
     Their funeral piles with fuel, and looked up
     With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
     The pall of a past world; and then again
     With curses cast them down upon the dust,
     And gnashed their teeth and howled. . . . 
     And War, which for a moment was no more,
     Did glut himself again—­a meal was bought
     With blood, and each sat sullenly apart,
     Gorging himself in gloom, . . . and the pang
     Of famine fed upon all entrails;—­men
     Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh
     The meager by the meager were devoured,
     Even dogs assailed their masters.”

How graphic, how dramatic, how realistic is this picture!  And how true!

For the legends show us that when, at last, the stones and clay had ceased to fall, and the fire had exhausted itself, and the remnant of mankind were able to dig their way out, to what an awful wreck of nature did they return.

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