first tells by way of contrast what he does not regret; and his poem is simple, straightforward. Byron, however, in his "Stanzas for Music," of which Canon Farrar thought well enough to insert them in his "With the Poets," and Mr. Palgrave thinks good enough to be admitted into his "Treasury of English Poetry," finds it necessary to preface it with something like philosophical remarks, and then proceeds in this fashion:—
"Then the few whose spirits float above the wreck of happiness
Are driven o'er the shoals of guilt or ocean of excess:
The magnet of their course is gone, or only points in vain
The shore to which their shivered sail shall never stretch again.
"Then the mortal coldness of the soul till death itself comes down;
It cannot feel for other's woes, it dare not dream its own.
That heavy chill has frozen o'er the fountain of our tears,
And though the eye may sparkle still, 't is where the ice appears.
"Oh, could I feel as I have felt, or be what I have been,
Or weep as I could once have wept o'er many a vanished scene,
As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish though they be,
So midst the withered waste of life, those tears would flow to me."
