How nobly different was Burns, the peer of Byron in genius—analogous to him, as well in the strength of passion as in the beauty of imagination; attracted, like him, by the Circean cup, absorbed at times in his convivialities, but never jesting with virtue, jeering at religion, or scorning the recollections of a pious home and a praying father. They rose by the force of their genius—they fell by the strength of their passions; but the fall of the one was only a repetition of the lapses of apostate humanity—guilty, indeed, but profoundly self-lamented, often expiated in tears wept on the bosom of domestic affection. The fall of the other was like that of the arch-angel ruined, defying Omnipotence, even when rolling in agony on a sea of fire. Even when feeding his fancy and invigorating his imagination amid the rural charms and sublimities of Switzerland, Byron thus writes in his journal: “I am a lover of nature and an admirer of beauty. I can bear fatigue and welcome privation, and have seen some of the noblest views in the world. But in all this, the recollection of bitterness, and more especially of more recent and more home desolation, which must accompany me through life, have preyed upon me here; and neither the music of the shepherd, the crashing of the avalanche, nor the torrent, the mountain, the glacier, the forest, nor the cloud, have for one moment lightened the weight upon my heart, nor enabled me to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty, and the power, and the glory around, above, and beneath me.” Or, as expressed in another form: “——I have thought Too long and darkly, till my brain became, In its own eddy, boiling and o’er wrought— A whirling gulf of phantasy and flame.” Why all this? A part of the secret is disclosed by himself, in a letter to his friend Dallas: “My whole life has been at variance with propriety, not to say decency. . . . My friends are dead or estranged, and my existence a dreary void.” It had not been so had passion been held in check by principle, instead of principle being subjected to passion. There is, indeed, too much reason to believe the truth, that in connection with great versatility of powers, there is too often found a tendency to versatility of principle. So the unprincipled Chatterton said: “he held that man in contempt who could not write on both sides of a question.” Byron delights in sketching the most odd and opposite sorts and styles of pictures, and in abruptly bringing into rude collision the most opposite principles, as if he would amuse himself with the shock while he distresses the sensibilities of others. His powers were mighty, various, beautiful; but they needed adjustment. There was no regular balance-wheel in his intellectual and moral system. In another, or more painful sense, than the pensive and drooping genius of Cowper expressed it, might Byron say: