Not seldom from the uproar I retired Into a silent bay,--or sportively Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng, To cut across the reflex of a star, Image, that, flying still before me, gleamed Upon the glassy plain: and oftentimes, When we had given our bodies to the wind, And all the shadowy banks on either side Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still The rapid line of motion, then at once Have I, reclining back upon my heels Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs Wheeled by me--even as if the earth had rolled With visible motion her diurnal round! Behind me did they stretch in solemn train, Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched Till all was tranquil as a summer sea." This is a picture of nature which it would be difficult to match in later English poetry. In one of his most beautiful and profound poems, _Lines Composed a few Miles above Tintern Abbey_, Wordsworth has described his own feeling for nature in expressions which he declared that he recognised again in the most famous and most poetical passages of Byron's _Childe Harold_, and which, in any case, were indisputably epoch-making in English poetical art. He writes:-- "For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, And their glad animal movements all gone by) To me was all in all.--I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite: a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye." Granted that it was very absurd of Wordsworth to talk (to Moore in 1820) of Byron's plagiarisms from him, and to declare that the whole Third Canto of _Childe Harold_ was founded on his style and sentiments--and granted that Lord John Russell is right when he remarks drily in this connection that if Wordsworth wrote the Third Canto of _Childe Harold_, it is his best work--it is, nevertheless, easy to understand that Wordsworth could not but feel as if, in the chief passages in that canto, and the celebrated passages about solitude in the earlier cantos, what was naturally expressed by him had been worked by Byron into a laboured and antithetical sort of declamation.[1] It is not difficult to discern, in these outbursts, the wounded vanity of a narrow mind which felt itself eclipsed; but it cannot be denied that it really was Wordsworth who first struck the chord which Byron varied with such skill, nor that single striking and vivid lines of Wordsworth's had impressed themselves on Byron's memory. Who can read, for example, the following lines of _Childe Harold_ (Canto iii. 72):-- [1] See Thomas Moore: _Memoirs_, iii. 161.