his lifetime, has been carried to exaggeration since his death.  Certain social opinions, to which I myself belong, but which, although founded on a sacred principle, should not be allowed to interfere with the impartiality of our judgment, have weighed heavily in the balance; and many young, ardent, and enthusiastic minds of our day have reiterated with Bonne that Goethe is the worst of despots; the cancer of the German body.

The English reaction against Byron—­I do not speak of that mixture of cant and stupidity which denies the poet his place in Westminster Abbey, but of literary reaction—­has shown itself still more unreasoning.  I have met with adorers of Shelley who denied the poetic genius of Byron; others who seriously compared his poems with those of Sir Walter Scott.  One very much overrated critic writes that “Byron makes man after his own image, and woman after his own heart; the one is a capricious tyrant, the other a yielding slave.”  The first forgot the verses in which their favorite hailed

    “The pilgrim of eternity, whose fame
     Over his living head like Heaven is bent;”
     [Footnote:  Adonais.]

the second, that after the appearance of “The Giaour” and “Childe Harold,” Sir Walter Scott renounced writing poetry. [Footnote:  Lockhart.] The last forgot that while he was quietly writing criticisms, Byron was dying for new-born liberty in Greece.  All judged, too many in each country still judge, the two poets, Byron and Goethe, after an absolute type of the beautiful, the true, or the false, which they had formed in their own minds; without regard to the state of social relations as they were or are; without any true conception of the destiny or mission of poetry, or of the law by which it, and every other artistic manifestation of human life, is governed.

There is no absolute type on earth:  the absolute exists in the Divine Idea alone; the gradual comprehension of which man is destined to attain; although its complete realization is impossible on earth; earthly life being but one stage of the eternal evolution of life, manifested in thought and action; strengthened by all the achievements of the past, and advancing from age to age towards a less imperfect expression of that idea.  Our earthly life is one phase of the eternal aspiration of the soul towards progress, which is our law ascending in increasing power and purity from the finite towards the infinite; from the real towards the Ideal; from that which is, towards that which is to come.  In the immense storehouse of the past evolutions of life constituted by universal tradition, and in the prophetic instinct brooding in the depths of the human soul, does poetry seek inspiration.  It changes with the times, for it is their expression; it is transformed with society, for—­ consciously or unconsciously—­it sings the lay of Humanity; although, according to the individual bias or circumstances of the singer, it assumes the hues of the present, or of the future in course of elaboration, and foreseen by the inspiration of genius.  It sings now a dirge and now a cradle song; it initiates or sums up.