Byron may not rise to that; but, in recompense, he has his gift of impassioned reasoning in connected soliloquy, which is not the less spontaneous for all its logic, and which we feel kindling as it proceeds; it is not thought out beforehand. More than this, he sometimes catches a true song-tune, and shows a musical craft not unlike his friend Moore’s. Would any man who was destitute of this craft have shortened by a foot the last line in the following eight?
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.
Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon.
Even in the Hours of Idleness, his péché de jeunesse, and still more in Hebrew Melodies, with “Oh! snatch’d away in Beauty’s bloom”; and most of all, perhaps, in the three or four poems “To Augusta,” this rarer strain is heard. And the most musical of these has, again, an eighteenth-century measure and melody, the melody of Gray’s Amatory Stanzas, and of Cowper’s “The poplars are felled.” The passionate or affectionate matter is kept in order and solemnised by the restraint and balance of that good tradition—which, of course, in those earlier hands had not always lent itself to vehement feeling. The second verse rises, no doubt, above the first, which is cast in antitheses. I know it is in the anthologies, but it will bear repeating:
Though human, thou didst not deceive me,
Though woman, thou didst not forsake,
Though loved, thou forborest to grieve me,
Though slander’d, thou never couldst shake;
Though trusted, thou didst not disclaim me;
Though parted, it was not to fly;
Though watchful, ’twas not to defame me,
Nor, mute, that the world might belie….
From the wreck of the past, which bath perish’d,
Thus much I at least may recall,
It hath taught me that what I most cherish’d
Deserv’d to be dearest of all;
In the desert a fountain is springing,
In the wide waste there still is a tree,
And a bird in the solitude singing,
Which speak to my spirit of thee.
I am not sure that any of the poets who have been Byron’s critics wrote anything which they should have been prouder to sign than that. It is needless to speak of his other, his martial strain, of the
