Such were Byron and Goethe in their general characteristics; both great poets; very different, and yet, complete as is the contrast between them, and widely apart as are the paths they pursue, arriving at the same point.  Life and death, character and poetry, everything is unlike in the two, and yet the one is the complement of the other.  Both are the children of fatality—­for it is especially at the close of epochs that the providential law which directs the generations assumes towards individuals the semblance of fatality—­and compelled by it unconsciously to work out a great mission.  Goethe contemplates the world in parts, and delivers the impressions they make upon him, one by one, as occasion presents them.  Byron looks upon the world from a single comprehensive point of view; from the height of which he modifies in his own soul the impressions produced by external objects, as they pass before him.  Goethe successively absorbs his own individuality in each of the objects he reproduces.  Byron stamps every object he portrays with his own individuality.  To Goethe, nature is the symphony; to Byron it is the prelude.  She furnishes to the one the entire subject; to the other the occasion only of his verse.  The one executes her harmonies; the other composes on the theme she has suggested.  Goethe better exgresses lives; Byron life.  The one is most vast; the other more deep.  The first searches everywhere for the beautiful, and loves, above all things, harmony and repose; the other seeks the sublime, and adores action and force.  Characters, such as Coriolanus or Luther, disturbed Goethe.  I know not if, in his numerous pieces of criticism, he has ever spoken of Dante; but assuredly he must have shared the antipathy felt for him by Sir Walter Scott; and although he would undoubtedly have sufficiently respected his genius to admit him into his Pantheon, yet he would certainly have drawn a veil between his mental eye and the grand but sombre figure of the exiled seer, who dreamed of the future empire of the world for his country, and of the world’s harmonious development under her guidance.  Byron loved and drew inspiration from Dante.  He also loved Washington and Franklin, and followed, with all the sympathies of a soul athirst for action, the meteor-like career of the greatest genius of action our age has produced, Napoleon; feeling indignant—­ perhaps mistakenly—­that he did not die in the struggle.

When travelling in that second fatherland of all poetic souls—­ Italy—­the poets still pursued divergent routes; the one experienced sensations; the other emotions; the one occupied himself especially with nature; the other with the greatness dead, the living wrongs, the human memories. [Footnote:  The contrast between the two poets is nowhere more strikingly displayed than by the manner in which they were affected by the sight of Rome.  In Goethe’s Elegies and in his Travels in Italy we find the impressions of the artist only.  He did not understand Rome.