triumph of liberty.  The following passage from his journal is the very abstract of the law governing the efforts of the true party of progress at the present day:  “Onwards! it is now the time to act; and what signifies self, if a single spark of that which would be worthy of the past [Footnote:  Written in Italy.] can be bequeathed unquenchably to the future?  It is not one man, nor a million, but the spirit of liberty which must be spread.  The waves which dash on the shore are, one by one, broken; but yet the ocean conquers nevertheless.  It overwhelms the armada; it wears the rock; and if the Neptunians are to be believed, it has not only destroyed but made a world.”  At Naples, in the Romagna, wherever he saw a spark of noble life stirring, he was ready for any exertion; or danger, to blow it into a flame.  He stigmatized baseness, hypocrisy, and injustice, whencesoever they sprang.

Thus lived Byron, ceaselessly tempest-tossed between the ills of the present and his yearnings after the future; often unequal; sometimes sceptical; but always suffering—­often most so when he seemed to laugh;

     [Footnote: 
     “And if I laugh at any mortal thing,
       ’Tis that I may not weep.”]
      and always loving, even
       when he seemed to curse.

Never did “the eternal spirit of the chainless mind” make a brighter apparition amongst us.  He seems at times a transformation of that immortal Prometheus, of whom he has written so nobly; whose cry of agony, yet of futurity, sounded above the cradle of the European world; and whose grand and mysterious form, transfigured by time, reappears from age to age, between the entombment of one epoch and the accession of another; to wail forth the lament of genius, tortured by the presentment of things it will not see realized in its time.  Byron, too, had the “firm will” and the “deep sense;” he, too, made of his “death a victory.”  When he heard the cry of nationality and liberty burst forth in the land he had loved and sung in early youth, he broke his harp and set forth.  While the Christian Powers were protocolizing or worse—­while the Christian nations were doling forth the alms of a few piles of ball in aid of the cross struggling with the Crescent; he, the poet, and pretended sceptic, hastened to throw his fortune, his genius, and his life at the feet of the first people that had arisen in the name of the nationality and liberty he loved.

I know no more beautiful symbol of the future destiny and mission of art than the death of Byron in Greece.  The holy alliance of poetry with the cause of the peoples; the union—­still so rare—­of thought and action—­which alone completes the human Word, and is destined to emancipate the world; the grand solidarity of all nations in the conquest of the rights ordained by God for all his children, and in the accomplishment of that mission for which alone such rights exist—­all that is now the religion and the hope of the party of progress throughout Europe, is gloriously typified in this image, which we, barbarians that we are, have already forgotten.