Byron was a great poet but not a great literary artist. He wrote negligently and with the ease of assured strength; his mind gathering heat as it moved, and pouring itself forth in reckless profusion. His work is diffuse and imperfect; much of it is melodrama or speech-making, rather than true poetry. But, on the other hand, much, very much of it is unexcelled as the direct, strong, sincere utterance of personal feeling. Such is the quality of his best lyrics, like _When We Two Parted_, the _Elegy on Thyrza_, _Stanzas to Augusta_, _She Walks in Beauty_, and of innumerable passages, lyrical and descriptive, in his longer poems. He had not the wisdom of Wordsworth, nor the rich and subtle imagination of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats when they were at their best. But he had greater body and motive force than any of them. He is the strongest personality among English poets since Milton, though his strength was wasted by want of restraint and self-culture. In Milton the passion was there, but it was held in check by the will and the artistic conscience, made subordinate to good ends, ripened by long reflection, and finally uttered in forms of perfect and harmonious beauty. Byron's love of Nature was quite different in kind from Wordsworth's. Of all English poets he has sung most lyrically of that national theme, the sea; as witness, among many other passages, the famous apostrophe to the ocean which closes _Childe Harold_, and the opening of the third canto in the same poem,
He had a passion for night and storm, because they made him forget himself.
Most glorious night! Thou wert not sent for slumber! Let me be A sharer in thy fierce and far delight, A portion of the tempest and of thee!
Byron's literary executor and biographer was the Irish poet, Thomas Moore, a born song-writer, whose _Irish Melodies_, set to old native airs, are, like Burns's, genuine, spontaneous singing, and run naturally to music. Songs such as the _Meeting of the Waters_, _The Harp of Tara_, _Those Evening Bells_, the _Light of Other Days_, _Araby's Daughter_, and the _Last Rose of Summer_ were, and still are, popular favorites. Moore's Oriental romance, _Lalla Rookh_, 1817, is overladen with ornament and with a sugary sentiment that clogs the palate. He had the quick Irish wit, sensibility rather than passion, and fancy rather than imagination.