Page:The Review of English Studies Vol 1.djvu/45

Rh pebbles and the shells,” it is too familiar; and so is the picture of the sleepers in the harem. Less known is that of the English mansion, “Norman Abbey,” in the thirteenth canto of Don Juan:

Any one can pick holes in this; would Tennyson have allowed the jingle Caractacus … act? Or did take? No, he would not. But stand a little way back, and the broad, free composition tells, and the effect is beautiful. Byron’s plastic sense was not, we may think, originally strong; but his wanderings among the galleries of painting and sculpture, which he describes so rhetorically in Childe Harold, may well have sharpened that sense.

4. But what of his instinct for beauty and harmony in language? We have been told for fifty years what a sinner he is in this respect; and we all know how bad he can be, and how bad he seems to wish to be. No one to-day, perhaps, cares much for the breathless iteration of pseudo-passionate matter which charmed the first readers of his lays. But let us take Byron when we know that he is in earnest—at least for the moment—and where no irony can intrude. It may seem strange to compare him with Wordsworth, whom he both mocked at and venerated. But sometimes he commands a clear and pure fount of diction, one or two degrees above grave prose, which is curiously like Wordsworth’s diction of that order. Byron could often inspire his words with beauty when his feeling itself ran clear and pure. I find this diction in The Dream. Here he imagines, or remembers, how in the hour of his wedding to Miss Milbanke he found himself thinking of Mary Chaworth. The lines will be known here in Nottingham, and to this audience, better than anywhere else; but I quote a few of them to bear out my suggestion