When, purified alike from imitation and distrust, men learn to pay righteous reverence to the mighty fallen, I know not whether Goethe will obtain more of their admiration as an artist, but I am certain that Byron will inspire them with more love, both as man and poet—­a love increased even by the fact of the great injustice hitherto shown to him.  While Goethe held himself aloof from us, and from the height of his Olympian calm seemed to smile with disdain at our desires, our struggles, and our sufferings—­Byron wandered through the world, sad, gloomy, and unquiet; wounded, and bearing the arrow in the wound.  Solitary and unfortunate in his infancy; unfortunate in his first love, and still more terribly so in his ill-advised marriage; attacked and calumniated both in his acts and intentions without inquiry or defence; harassed by pecuniary difficulties; forced to quit his country, home, and child; friendless—­we have seen it too clearly since his death—­pursued even on the Continent by a thousand absurd and infamous falsehoods, and by the cold malignity of a world that twisted even his sorrows into a crime; he yet, in the midst of inevitable reaction, preserved his love for his sister and his Ada; his compassion for misfortune; his fidelity to the affections of his childhood and youth, from Lord Clare to his old servant Murray, and his nurse Mary Gray.  He was generous with his money to all whom he could help or serve, from his literary friends down to the wretched libeller Ashe.  Though impelled by the temper of his genius, by the period in which he lived, and by that fatality of his mission to which I have alluded, towards a poetic individualism, the inevitable incompleteness of which I have endeavored to explain, he by no means set it up as a standard.  That he presaged the future with the prevision of genius is proved by his definition of poetry in his journal—­a definition hitherto misunderstood, but yet the best I know:  “Poetry is the feeling of a former world and of a future.”  Poet as he was, he preferred activity for good, to all that his art could do.  Surrounded by slaves and their oppressors; a traveller in countries where even remembrance seemed extinct; never did he desert the cause of the peoples; never was he false to human sympathies.  A witness of the progress of the Restoration, and the triumph of the principles of the Holy Alliance, he never swerved from his courageous opposition; he preserved and publicly proclaimed his faith in the rights of the peoples and in the final

     [Footnote: 
     Yet, Freedom! yet, thy banner torn, but flying,
       Streams, like the thunder-storm, against the wind: 
     Thy trumpet voice, though broken now and dying,
       The loudest still the tempest leaves behind. 
       The tree hath lost its blossomes, and the rind,
     Chopped by the axe, looks rough and little worth,
       But the sap lasts—­and still the seed we find
     Sown deep, even in the bosom of the North,
     So shall a better spring less bitter fruit bring forth.”]