it must be there.  Nothing.  A glorious past, a degraded present; none of life’s poetry; no movement, save that of the sufferer turning on his couch to relieve his pain.  Byron, from the solitude of his exile, turns his eyes again towards England; he sings.  What does he sing?  What springs from the mysterious and unique conception which rules, one would say in spite of himself, over all that escapes him in his sleepless vigil?  The funeral hymn, the death-song, the epitaph of the aristocratic idea; we discovered it, we Continentalists; not his own countrymen.  He takes his types from amongst those privileged by strength, beauty, and individual power.  They are grand, poetical, heroic, but solitary; they hold no communion with the world around them, unless it be to rule, over it; they defy alike the good and evil principle; they “will bend to neither.”  In life and in death “they stand upon their strength;” they resist every power, for their own is all their, own; it was purchased by

     “Superior science—­penance—­daring-
     And length of watching-strength of mind—­and skill
     In knowledge of our fathers.”

Each of them is the personification, slightly modified, of a single type, a single idea—­the individual; free, but nothing more than free; such as the epoch now closing has made him; Faust, but without the compact which submits him to the enemy; for the heroes of Byron make no such compact.  Cain kneels not to Arimanes; and Manfred, about to die, exclaims: 

     “The mind, which is immortal, makes itself
      Requital for its good and evil thoughts-
      Is its own origin of ill, and end-
      And its own place and time, its innate sense,
      When stripped of this mortality, derives
      No color from the fleeting things without,
      But is absorbed in sufferance or in joy;
      Born from the knowledge of its own desert.”

They have no kindred:  they live from their own life only they repulse humanity, and regard the crowd with disdain.  Each of them says:  “I have faith in myself”; never, “I have faith in ourselves.”  They all aspire to power or to happiness.  The one and the other alike escape them; for they bear within them, untold, unacknowledged even to themselves, the presentiment of a life that mere liberty can never give them.  Free they are; iron souls in iron frames, they climb the Alps of the physical world as well as the Alps of thought; still is their visage stamped with a gloomy and ineffaceable sadness; still is their soul-whether, as in Cain and Manfred, it plunge into the abyss of the infinite, “intoxicated with eternity,” or scour the vast plain and boundless ocean with the Corsair and Giaour—­haunted by a secret and sleepless dread.  It seems as if they were doomed to drag the broken links of the chain they have burst asunder, riveted to their feet.  Not only in the petty society against which they rebel does their soul feel fettered