‘I see before me the Gladiator lie: He leans upon his hand--his manly brow Consents to death, but conquers agony, And his droop’d head sinks gradually low-- And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one, Like the first of a thunder-shower; and now The arena swims around him; he is gone, Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hail’d the wretch who won. CXLI He heard it, but he heeded not--his eyes Were with his heart, and that was far away; He reck’d not of the life he lost nor prize, But where his rude hut by the Danube lay, _There_ were his young barbarians all at play, _There_ was their Dacian mother--he, their sire, Butcher’d to make a Roman holiday-- All this rush’d with his blood--Shall he expire, And unavenged?--Arise! ye Goths, and glut your ire!’ “By so doing I may be applying the wrong test myself, since it is a commonplace of criticism that Byron must be judged by the whole and not by fragments; but I maintain that just as if some one were to examine a limb hacked off a statue by Michael Angelo or a horse’s head from the Parthenon frieze he would say the hand who wrought such a fragment was a mighty hand; so it is with this short quotation; it is impossible to read it without being convinced that the man who wrote it was more than a ‘clever man.’ He was a poet. He was a great poet. Because to have said-- ‘his eyes Were with his heart, and that was far away,’ in this connection signifies that he had the gift by the use of the simplest possible and most ordinary words of piercing the heart and brain with the divine stab which only great poetry can inflict. “Other poets can do other things. But because Virgil and Keats touch you with a wand that produces a ravishing enchantment, because Shelley and Coleridge lift you into unimagined heavens of light and music, because Shakespeare takes your breath away by the potent magic of his phrases, that does not prove that Byron has not in his fashion achieved what is generally accepted as being one of the highest achievements of poetry: that is to say, the achievement of making style disappear and of knocking you on the head with poetry made out of the language of every day. “Goethe is usually thought to be a great poet. But Goethe’s claim to greatness as a poet rests on this achievement, on nothing less and on nothing more. When he is at his best, as in the first part of _Faust_ and in a dozen lyrics, he gets beyond and above style and writes-- ‘Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh,’ or ‘Mein Ruh ist hin,’ or ‘Wer nie sein Brot mit Thränen ass,’ or ‘Von wem Ich’s habe, dass sag Ich Euch nicht,’ or