and restrained; but even in the world of the spirit.  Neither is it to the enmity of society that they succumb; but under the assaults of this nameless anguish; under the corroding action of potent faculties “inferior still to their desires and their conceptions”; under the deception that comes from within.  What can they do with the liberty so painfully won?  On whom, on what, expend the exuberant vitality within them?  They are alone; this is the secret of their wretchedness and impotence.  They “thirst for good”—­Cain has said it for them all—­but cannot achieve it; for they have no mission, no belief, no comprehension even of the world around them.  They have never realized the conception of Humanity in the multitudes that have preceded, surround, and will follow after them; never thought on their own place between the past and future; on the continuity of labor that unites all the generations into one whole; on the common end and aim, only to be realized by the common effort; on the spiritual post-sepulchral life even on earth of the individual, through the thoughts he transmits to his fellows; and, it may be—­ when he lives devoted and dies. in faith—­through the guardian agency he is allowed to exercise over the loved ones left on earth.

Gifted with a liberty they know not how to use; with a power and energy they know not how to apply; with a life whose purpose and aim they comprehend not; they drag through their useless and convulsed existence.  Byron destroys them one after the other, as if he were the executioner of a sentence decreed in heaven.  They fall unwept, like a withered leaf into the stream of time.

     “Nor earth nor sky shall yield a single tear,
     Nor cloud shall gather more, nor leaf shall fall,
     Nor gale breathe forth one sigh for thee, for all.”

They die, as they have lived, alone; and a popular malediction hovers round their solitary tombs.

This, for those who can read with the soul’s eyes, is what Byron sings; or rather what humanity sings through him.  The emptiness of the life and death of solitary individuality has never been so powerfully and efficaciously summed up as in the pages of Byron.  The crowd do not comprehend him:  they listen; fascinated for an instant; then repent, and avenge their momentary transport by calumniating and insulting the poet.  His intuition of the death of a form of society they call wounded self-love; his sorrow for all is misinterpreted as cowardly egotism.  They credit not the traces of profound suffering revealed by his lineaments; they credit not the presentiment of a new life which from time to time escapes his trembling lips; they believe not in the despairing embrace in which he grasps the material universe—­stars, lakes, alps, and sea—­and identifies himself with it, and through it with God, of whom—­to him at least—­it is a symbol.  They do, however, take careful count of some unhappy moments, in which, wearied out by the emptiness of life, he