To the Reader
decadent; it betrays hardly a trace of the symbolist diction so little in accord with the genius of our English tongue. His ballads—and he is at his best in these—have the ring of a manful and genuinely American songster. They are what such a one might well compose at the outset of a new century, and in a country of the future. Nearly all of this verse is in the major key. Even its brooding sentiment is that of a live man and no weakling.
Byron was a live man, and, to the end, a young man, never more so than when he thought himself otherwise. If it were just to apply a single epithet to the titular poem of this volume, it might be termed Byronic; for it is full of the Haroldian spirit of youth,—never more so than when its writer, at that stage where a man feels older than he ever again will feel until reaching his grand climacteric, breaks forth with “Heart of my heart, I am no longer young!” He revels, besides, like the Georgian pilgrim, in the sense of freedom, as he goes oversea to test the further world. The Garden of Years is a love poem; but its emotion is a warm under-color, toning a novice’s pictures of travel during his wander-year. Technically, the poem is cast in an original stanzaic form, effectively maintained from beginning to end.
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