The eternal synthesis that, from the heights of the Capitol and St. Peter, is gradually unfolded in ever-widening circles, embracing first a nation and then Europe, as it will ultimately embrace humanity, remained unrevealed to him; he saw only the inner circle of paganism; the least prolific, as well as least indigenous.  One might fancy that he caught a glimpse of it for an instant, when he wrote:  “History is read here far otherwise than in any other spot in the universe; elsewhere we read it from without to within; here one seems to read it from within to without; “but if so, he soon lost sight of it again, and became absorbed in external nature.”  Whether we halt or advance, we discover a landscape ever renewing itself in a thousand fashions.  We have palaces and ruins; gardens and solitudes:  the horizon lengthens in the distance, or suddenly contracts; huts and stables, columns and triumphal arches, all lie pell-mell, and often so close that we might find room for all on the same sheet of paper.”

At Rome Byron forgot passions, sorrows, his own individuality, all, in the presence of a great idea; witness this utterance of a soul born for devotedhess:—­

    “O Rome! my country! city of the soul! 
       The orphans of the heart must turn to thee,
      Lone mother of dead empires! and control
       In their shut breasts their petty misery.”

When at last he came to a recollection of himself and his position, it was with a hope for the world (stanza 98) and a pardon for his enemies.  From the fourth canto of Childe Harold, the daughter of Byron might learn more of the true spirit of her father than from all the reports she may have heard, and all the many volumes that have been written upon him.]

And yet, notwithstanding all the contrasts, which I have only hinted at, but which might be far more elaborately displayed by extracts from their works; they arrived—­Goethe, the poet of individuality in its objective life—­at the egotism of indifference; Byron—­the poet of individuality an its subjective life—­at the egotism (I say it with regret, but it, too, is egotism) of despair:  a double sentence upon the epoch which it was their mission to represent and to close!

Both of them—­I am not speaking of their purely literary merits, incontestable and universally acknowledged—­the one by the spirit of resistance that breathes through all his creations; the other by the spirit of sceptical irony that pervades his works, and by the independent sovereignty attributed to art over all social relations--greatly aided the cause of intellectual emancipation, and awakened in men’s minds the sentiment of liberty.  Both of them—­the one, directly, by the implacable war he waged against the vices and absurdities of the privileged classes, and indirectly, by investing his heroes with all the most brilliant qualities of the despot, and then dashing them to pieces as if in anger;—­the other, by the poetic rehabilitation