In the second half of the work the character of the poet's solitariness has changed. There is a marked difference between the desire for solitary communion with nature which Harold felt as an inexperienced youth, and that which he felt as a man, at the end of his first circumnavigation of the world of men and things. It was now no longer fear of human beings, but disgust with them, which drove him to take refuge with nature. Society, the best society of a great metropolis, which to the untrained eye seemed so humane, so right-thinking, so refined and chivalrous, had turned its wrong side towards him--and the wrong side is interesting, but not beautiful. He had learned how much friendship the ruined man may reckon on, had learned that the only force which he who is making plans for his future can exactly calculate is the self-love of his fellow-men, with its consequences. So he withdrew into himself again; and the poetry he wrote at this time is not for men of a sociable nature. But the man who has had even a short experience of what it is to turn his back on his fellow-men--who in his desire to escape from them has left his home, his country, in search of a new earth and new skies--who in the solitudes of his choice has felt the sight of an approaching human being equivalent to a foul spot on his pure, free horizon--in the souls of this man and his like, Byron's lyric outbursts will find an echo. Childe Harold is a solitary. He has learned that he is "the most unfit of men to herd with man," because he is unable "to submit his thoughts to others ... to yield dominion of his mind to spirits against whom his own rebelled." But, "Where rose the mountains, there to him were friends; Where roll'd the ocean, thereon was his home. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The desert, forest, cavern, breaker's foam, Were unto him companionship; they spake A mutual language, clearer than the tome Of his land's tongue, which he would oft forsake For Nature's pages glass'd by sunbeams on the lake." Amongst men he droops like a wild-born falcon with clipt wing. But in his case, to fly from, is not to hate, mankind. It is not discontent or defiance which keeps his "mind deep in its fountain," but fear lest it should "overboil in the hot throng," where in a moment "We may plunge our years In fatal penitence, and in the blight Of our own soul, turn all our blood to tears."