“If from society we learn to live, ’Tis solitude should teach us how to die. It hath no flatterers; vanity can give No hollow aid; alone, man with his God must strive.”
Besides that ORIGINALITY, which is a distinguishing attribute of the genius of Byron, there is in his language a power of concentration, which adds greatly to its vigor; some condensing process of thought is going on, the result of which is much meaning in few words, and those words kept under the law of fitness with more than military precision, yet without constraint. Few feeble words or straggling lines disfigure his poetry. That infamous effusion of a putrid mind, Don Juan, has most of them, while it has also some exquisite gems of beauty. As the last offspring of a teeming mind, it evidences a progress in sensual depravity, and an effrontery in publishing it to the world, seldom adventured by the most reckless contemner of the opinion of his fellow men, or the most impious blasphemer of the majesty of God. Indeed, his moral sense must have reached that region said to be inhabited by demons, who “impair the strength of better thoughts,”
“Making the sun like blood, the earth a tomb, The tomb a hell, and hell itself a murkier gloom.”
It was of this last, deeply characteristic work, that Blackwood’s Magazine said, at the time: “In its composition there is unquestionably a more thorough and intense infusion of genius and vice, power and profligacy, than in any poem which had ever been written in the English, or indeed in any other modern language.” No poem, perhaps, ever exhibited a more remarkable mixture of ease, strength, fluency, gayety, mock-seriousness, and even refined tenderness of sentiment along with coarse indecency. Love, honor, purity, patriotism, chastity, religion, are all set forth or set at naught, just as suits the present, vagrant fancy of the author. The Edinburgh Review justly said: “We are acquainted with no writings so well calculated to extinguish in young minds all generous enthusiasm and gentle affection, all respect for themselves, and all love for their kind; to make them practice and profess hardly what it teaches them to suspect in others, and actually to persuade them that it is wise and manly, and knowing, to laugh, not only at self-denial and restraint, but at all aspiring ambition, and all warm and constant affection.”