Prophecy in
Rousseau became poetry in Byron.
There was much common ground between these two passionate aspiring
spirits, who never attained to Goethe's serenity. Both were
melancholy, and fled from their fellows; both strove for perfect
liberty and unlimited self-assertion; both felt with the wild and
uproarious side of Nature, and found idyllic scenes marred by
thoughts of mankind.
Byron's turbulence never subsided; and his love for Nature,
passionate and comprehensive as it was, was always 'sickled o'er'
with misanthropy and pessimism, with the 'world-pain.'
He turned to her first through disdain of his kind and love of
introspection, and later on, when he was spurned by the London world
which had been at his feet, and disdain grew into hatred and disgust,
from a wish to be alone. But, as Boettger says:
Though this heart, in which the whole universe is reflected, is a
sick one, it has immeasurable depths, and an intensified spirit
life which draws everything under its sway and inspires it,
feeling and observing everything only as part of itself.
The basis of Byron's feeling for Nature was a revolutionary
one--elementary passion. The genius which threw off stanza after
stanza steeped in melody, was coupled with an unprecedented
subjectivity and individualism. When the first part of _Childe
Harold_ came out, dull London society was bewitched by the music and
novelty of this enthusiastic lyric of Nature, with its incomparable
interweaving of scenery and feeling:
The sails were fill'd, and fair the light winds blew,
As glad to waft him from his native home.
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