He wrote
negligently and with the ease of assured strength; his mind gathering
heat as it moved, and pouring itself forth in reckless profusion. His
work is diffuse and imperfect; much of it is melodrama or speech-making,
rather than true poetry. But, on the other hand, much, very much of it
is unexcelled as the direct, strong, sincere utterance of personal
feeling. Such is the quality of his best lyrics, like _When We Two
Parted_, the _Elegy on Thyrza_, _Stanzas to Augusta_, _She Walks in
Beauty_, and of innumerable passages, lyrical and descriptive, in his
longer poems. He had not the wisdom of Wordsworth, nor the rich and
subtle imagination of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats when they were at
their best. But he had greater body and motive force than any of them.
He is the strongest personality among English poets since Milton, though
his strength was wasted by want of restraint and self-culture. In Milton
the passion was there, but it was held in check by the will and the
artistic conscience, made subordinate to good ends, ripened by long
reflection, and finally uttered in forms of perfect and harmonious
beauty. Byron's love of Nature was quite different in kind from
Wordsworth's. Of all English poets he has sung most lyrically of that
national theme, the sea; as witness, among many other passages, the
famous apostrophe to the ocean which closes _Childe Harold_, and the
opening of the third canto in the same poem,
Once more upon the waters, etc.
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