as being the veritable voice of one

  Spell-bound, within the clustering Cyclades.

The opening lines of the same canto, transplanted from the Curse of Minerva, are even more suggestive:—­

  Slow sinks, more lovely ere his race be run,
  Along Morea’s hill the setting sun,
  Not, as in northern climes, obscurely bright,
  But one unclouded blaze of living light, &c.

In the same way, the later cantos of Harold are steeped in Switzerland and in Italy.  Byron’s genius, it is true, required a stimulus; it could not have revelled among the daisies of Chaucer, or pastured by the banks of the Doon or the Ouse, or thriven among the Lincolnshire fens.  He had a sincere, if somewhat exclusive, delight in the storms and crags that seemed to respond to his nature and to his age.  There is no affectation in the expression of the wish, “O that the desert were my dwelling-place!” though we know that the writer on the shores of the Mediterranean still craved for the gossip of the clubs.  It only shows that—­

      Two desires toss about
    The poet’s feverish blood;
  One drives him to the world without,
    And one to solitude.

Of Byron’s two contemporary rivals, Wordsworth had no feverish blood; nothing drove him to the world without; consequently his “eyes avert their ken from half of human fate,” and his influence, though perennial, will always be limited.  He conquered England from his hills and lakes; but his spirit has never crossed the Straits which he thought too narrow.  The other, with a fever in his veins, calmed it in the sea and in the cloud, and, in some degree because of his very excellencies, has failed as yet to mark the world at large.  The poets’ poet, the cynosure of enthusiasts, he bore the banner of the forlorn hope; but Byron, with his feet of clay, led the ranks.  Shelley, as pure a philanthropist as St. Francis or Howard, could forget mankind, and, like his Adonais, become one with nature.  Byron, who professed to hate his fellows, was of them even more than for them, and so appealed to them through a broader sympathy, and held them with a firmer hand.  By virtue of his passion, as well as his power, he was enabled to represent the human tragedy in which he played so many parts, and to which his external universe of cloudless moons, and vales of evergreen, and lightning-riven peaks, are but the various background.  He set the “anguish, doubt, desire,” the whole chaos of his age, to a music whose thunder-roll seems to have inspired the opera of Lohengrin—­a music not designed to teach or to satisfy “the budge doctors of the Stoic fur,” but which will continue to arouse and delight the sons and daughters of men.