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150 PRÆTERITA-I
for Jessie’s death,1 by saying she was happier in Heaven; or for Charles’s by saying it was a Providential dispensation to me on Earth. He did not tell me that war was a just price for the glory of captains, or that the National command of murder diminished its guilt. Of all things within range of human thought he felt the facts, and discerned the natures with accurate justice.
But even all this he might have done, and yet been no master of mine, had not be sympathized with me in reverent love of beauty, and indignant recoil from ugliness. The witch of the Staubbach in her rainbow was a greatly more pleasant vision than Shakespeare’s, like a rat without a tail, or Burns’s, in her cutty sark.2 The sea-king Conrad had an immediate advantage with me over Coleridge’s long, lank, brown, and ancient, mariner;3 and whatever Pope might have gracefully said, or honestly felt of Windsor woods and streams, was mere tinkling cymbal to me, compared with Byron’s love of Lachin-y-Gair.
174. I must pause here, in tracing the sources of his influence over me, lest the reader should mistake the analysis which I am now able to give them, for a description of the feelings possible to me at fifteen. Most of these, however, were assuredly within the knot of my unfolding mind-as the saffron of the crocus yet beneath the earth; and Byron-though he could not teach me to love mountains or sea more than I did in childhood, first animated them for me with the sense of real human nobleness and grief. He taught me the meaning of Chillon and of Meillerie, and bade me seek first in Venice-the ruined homes of Foscari and Falier.
And observe, the force with which he struck depended again on there being unquestionable reality of person in his stories, as of principle in his thoughts. Romance,
1 [For Jessie’s death, see above, p. 70; and for that of Charles, p. 137.]
2 [Manfred, Act ii. sc. 2; Macbeth, Act i. sc. 3; Tam o’ Shanter.]
3 [For Conrad, see The Corsair. For other references to The Ancient Mariner, see Vol. XXV. p. 248, and Vol. XXXIV. p. 289; to Pope’s Windsor Forest, Vol. IX. p. 12, Vol. XIX. p. 128, and Vol. XXIII. p. 13; and to Lachin-y-Gair, Vol. XXXIV. p. 331.]
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
