Fill'd up As 'twere, anew, the gaps of centuries; Leaving that beautiful which still was so, And making that which was not; till the place Became religious, and the heart ran o'er With silent worship of the great of old-- The dead, but sceptred sovereigns, who still rule Our spirits from their urns.
Only he stands aright, who from his little point of present possession ever meditates on the far-reaching lines, which pass through his point from one interminable star-light distance to another. Neither the stoic pagan, nor the disciple of the creed which has some of the peculiar weakness of stoicism and not all its peculiar strength, could find Manfred's latest word untrue to himself:
The mind, which is immortal, makes itself Requital for its good or evil thoughts-- Is its own origin of ill and end, And its own place and time: its innate sense, When stripped of this mortality, derives No colour from the fleeting things without: But is absorbed in sufferance of joy, Born from the knowledge of its own desert.
It is only when a man subordinates this absorption in individual sufferance and joy to the thought that his life is a trust for humanity, that he is sure of making it anything other than 'rain fallen on the sand.' In the last great episode of his own career Byron was as lofty as the noblest side of his creed. The historic feeling for the unseen benefactors of old time was matched by vehemence of sympathy with the struggles for liberation of his own day. And for this, history will not forget him. Though he may have no place in our own Minster, he assuredly belongs to the band of far-shining men, of whom Pericles declared the whole world to be the tomb.
End of Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I, by John Morley