Goethe, in one of his conversations with Henry Crabb Robinson about Byron, said "There is no padding in his poetry" ("Es sind keine Flickwörter im Gedichte"). This was in 1829, five years after Byron died. "This, and indeed every evening, I believe, Lord Byron was the subject of his praise. He compared the brilliancy and clearness of his style to a metal wire drawn through a steel plate." He expressed regret that Byron should not have lived to execute his vocation, which he said was "to dramatize the Old Testament. What a subject under his hands would the Tower of Babel have been!" Byron's views of nature he declared were "equally profound and poetical." Power in all its forms Goethe had respect for, and he was captivated by the indomitable spirit of Manfred. He enjoyed the 'Vision of Judgment' when it was read to him, exclaiming "Heavenly!" "Unsurpassable!" "Byron has surpassed himself." He equally enjoyed the satire on George IV. He did not praise Milton with the warmth with which he eulogized Byron, of whom he said that "the like would never come again; he was inimitable." Goethe's was the Continental opinion, but it was heightened by his conception of "realism"; he held that the poet must be matter-of-fact, and that it was the truth and reality that made writing popular: "It is by the laborious collection of facts that even a poetical view of nature is to be corrected and authenticated." Tennyson was equally careful for scientific accuracy in regard to all the phenomena of nature. Byron had not scientific accuracy, but with his objectivity Goethe sympathized more than with the reflection and introspection of Wordsworth. Byron was hailed on the Continent as a poet of power, and the judgment of him was not influenced by his disregard of the society conventions of England, nor by his personal eccentricities, nor because he was not approved by the Tory party and the Tory writers. Perhaps unconsciously--certainly not with the conviction of Shelley--Byron was on the side of the new movement in Europe; the spirit of Rousseau, the unrest of 'Wilhelm Meister,' the revolutionary seething, with its tinge of morbidness and misanthropy, its brilliant dreams of a new humanity, and its reckless destructive theories. In France especially his influence was profound and lasting. His wit and his lyric fire excused his morbidness and his sentimental posing as a waif, unfriended in a cold and treacherous world of women and men; and his genius made misanthropy and personal recklessness a fashion. The world took his posing seriously and his grievances to heart, sighed with him, copied his dress, tried to imitate his adventures, many of them imaginary, and accepted him as a perturbed, storm-tost spirit, representative of an age of agitation. [Illustration: LORD GEORGE GORDON BYRON.]