For both these writers were capable, in a degree
rarely equalled in any literature, of reproducing, or rather, we should
say, of reconstructing, the pomp of Nature and of human life. In this
general office they stand together: both wear, in our eyes, the regal
purple; both have caused to rise between earth and heaven miracles of
grandeur, such as never Cheops wrought through his myriad slaves, or
Solomon with his fabled ring. But in the final result, as in the whole
_modus operandi_, of their architecture, they stand apart _toto coelo_.
Byron builds a structure that repeats certain elements in Nature or
humanity; but they are those elements only which are allied to gloom,
for he builds in suspicion and distrust, and upon the basis of a
cynicism that has been nurtured in his very flesh and blood from birth;
he erects a Pisa-like tower which overhangs and threatens all human
hopes and all that is beautiful in human love. Who else, save this
archangelic intellect, shut out by a mighty shadow of eclipse from the
bright hopes and warm affections of all sunny hearts, could have
originated such a Pandemonian monster as the poem on "Darkness"? The
most striking specimen of Byron's imaginative power, and nearly the most
striking that has ever been produced, is the apostrophe to the sea, in
"Childe Harold.
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