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Rh Byron may not rise to that; but, in recompense, he has his gift of impassioned reasoning in connected soliloquy, which is not the less spontaneous for all its logic, and which we feel kindling as it proceeds; it is not thought out beforehand. More than this, he sometimes catches a true song-tune, and shows a musical craft not unlike his friend Moore’s. Would any man who was destitute of this craft have shortened by a foot the last line in the following eight?

Even in the Hours of Idleness, his péché de jeunesse, and still more in Hebrew Melodies, with “Oh! snatch’d away in Beauty’s bloom”; and most of all, perhaps, in the three or four poems “To Augusta,” this rarer strain is heard. And the most musical of these has, again, an eighteenth-century measure and melody, the melody of Gray’s Amatory Stanzas, and of Cowper’s “The poplars are felled.” The passionate or affectionate matter is kept in order and solemnised by the restraint and balance of that good tradition—which, of course, in those earlier hands had not always lent itself to vehement feeling. The second verse rises, no doubt, above the first, which is cast in antitheses. I know it is in the anthologies, but it will bear repeating:

I am not sure that any of the poets who have been Byron’s critics wrote anything which they should have been prouder to sign than that. It is needless to speak of his other, his martial strain, of the