It is, perhaps, more correct to say of Byron, that he was charged with the spirit of revolt rather than with the revolutionary spirit. The revolutionary spirit was in him indefinite, inarticulate; he offered nothing to put in the place of the social and political evils against which he rebelled. There is nothing CONSTRUCTIVE in his poetry. But if his great passion-capital, his keen spiritual susceptibility, and his great power of vigorous expression, had been brought into the service of constructive thought, he might have been a restorative power in his generation. The greatest loss which English poetry ever sustained, was in the premature death of John Keats. What he would have done had his life been spared, we have an assurance in what he has left us. He was spiritually constituted to be one of the subtlest interpreters of the secrets of life that the whole range of English poetry exhibits. No poet ever more deeply felt “the vital connection of beauty with truth”. He realized in himself his idea of the poet expressed in his lines,-- “‘Tis the man who with a man Is an equal, be he king, Or poorest of the beggar-clan, Or any other wondrous thing A man may be ‘twixt ape and Plato; ‘Tis the man who with a bird, Wren, or eagle, finds his way to All its instincts; he hath heard The lion’s roaring, and can tell What his horny throat expresseth, And to him the tiger’s yell Comes articulate and presseth On his ear like mother tongue.” *