FROM THE POETRY OF LORD BYRON EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY FREDERIC IVES CARPENTER, PH.D. Dir in klar und trüben Tagen NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY CONTENTS IX. Summary: Permanent Elements and Final Posi- tion. Mazeppa: The Ride (Sections IX to the end). Don Juan: The Shipwreck (from Canto II) The Isles of Greece (from Canto III) The Death of Haidée (from Canto IV) Cain, Scene I of Act II . Know ye the land (from the "Bride of Aby- The Corsair's Song (from the "Corsair ") Grecian Sunset (from the "Corsair "). She walks in beauty (from the "Hebrew Melo- THERE are two aspects of Byron, almost equally attractive to the modern reader, although attractive in different ways. There is the personal Byron, vehemently masculine in most of his habits and doings, yet, as Moore and others who knew him report, strangely feminine in some of his traits, and perhaps again, as Goethe felt, as strangely immature and like a child as soon as he turned to reflection: the whole compound a brilliant meteoric genius that dazzled the eyes of Europe for a short generation. To us this Byron becomes a fascinating psychological study, a document in humanity, baffling our analysis, as he himself baffled his own analysis. For this study it is plain that we need all the evidence obtainable, letters, journals, the testimony alike of friends, of enemies, and of indifferent contemporaries, as well as all the verses, the bad with the good, which flowed so readily from his incontinent pen. On the other hand there is Byron the poet, whom, it is true, we cannot altogether separate from the personal Byron, but whom we should judge, as we judge other poets, by the best half of his work, in which, as Matthew Arnold, a poet writing of a poet, so finely says: |