"This makes the madmen who have made men mad By their contagion; Conquerors and Kings, Founders of sects and systems, to whom add Sophists, Bards, Statesmen, all unquiet things Which stir too strongly the soul's secret springs, And are themselves the fools to those they fool; Envied, yet how unenviable! what stings Are theirs! One breast laid open were a school Which would unteach mankind the lust to shine or rule. Their breath is agitation, and their life A storm whereon they ride, to sink at last, And yet so nursed and bigoted to strife, That should their days, surviving perils past, Melt to calm twilight, they feel overcast With sorrow and supineness, and so die; Even as a flame unfed, which runs to waste With its own flickering, or a sword laid by, Which eats into itself, and rusts ingloriously." And in a still more despairing mood Harold cries: "We wither from our youth, we gasp away-- Sick--sick; unfound the boon--unslaked the thirst, Though to the last, in verge of our decay, Some phantom lures, such as we sought at first-- But all too late,--so are we doubly curst. Love, fame, ambition, avarice--'tis the same, Each idle--and all ill--and none the worst-- For all are meteors with a different name, And Death the sable smoke where vanishes the flame. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Our life is a false nature--'tis not in The harmony of things,--this hard decree, This uneradicable taint of sin, This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree, Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be The skies which rain their plagues on men like dew-- Disease, death, bondage--all the woes we see, And worse, the woes we see not." In the First Canto of _Childe Harold_ we already find the _love of freedom_ (the third note in the chord struck by the poem) exalted as the one force capable of emancipating from the despair with which the universal misery (the _Weltschmerz_, as the Germans call it) has overwhelmed the soul. It has this power because it provides a practical task. During his first visit to Portugal, Childe Harold exclaimed: "Oh, that such hills upheld a free-born race!" And to the Spaniards he cried: "Awake, ye sons of Spain! awake! Advance! Lo, Chivalry, your ancient goddess, cries." And it was in the course of his first tour, too, that he thus apostrophised the subjugated Greeks, who went on hoping for help from other nations:--