Every one must have perceived that a new school of poetry is at hand. No one who has thought on the subject can have failed to see that the fever for Byron, like all fevers, is both wearing itself out and exhausting the patient. With the death of the noble lord began the decline of the school to which he gave such popularity, and though he has had many imitators since, the phrenzy respecting his poetry is nearly over. We do not mean to depreciate Byron. Every great poet should be spoken of with reverence; for they all alike discourse in the language of the gods; and Byron was not only a great poet, but the greatest poet of his school. That school, however, was a bad one—the fierce, unholy offspring of an incestuous age. It was a school in which the restlessness of passion seems to have forced its votaries into poetry. They had none of the calm, enduring enthusiasm of the great poets of the past; they did not speak with the majesty of Jove, but with the fury of a Delphin priestess. They were essentially the poets of a crowd, expressing the emotions of men in a state of high excitement, and consequently whirling away their hearers with them in a phrenzy for the time unconquerable, but destined to subside with the first calm in the public mind. But the truly great poets—Milton, Shakspeare and Spencer—sit far away on a mountain by themselves, singing in calm enthusiasm to the stars of heaven, and startling the dweller on the plain as well as the shepherd on the hill-side with a melody that seems a part of heaven. The school of Byron is that of a generation; the school of the old masters is that of eternity. The one is a lurid planet, that blazes fitfully amid storm and darkness; the others are fixed stars, that shine around Milton, the greatest of all, in undimmed and undying lustre. Ὡς δ’ οτ’ εν ουρανω αστρα φαεινην αμφι σεληνην Φαινετ’ αριπρεπεα.