Had he studied Greek as language, and Greek as style, he would, we may believe, have avoided earlier his one great fault, the fault of excess, extravagance, and riot. What Keats thought of the great Greek writers whose Greek he could not read, may be gathered from his lines to Homer: Standing aloof in giant ignorance, Of thee I hear, and of the Cyclades, As one who sits ashore and longs perchance To visit dolphin-coral in deep seas: and from those _On first looking into Chapman’s Homer_: Much have I travelled in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been, Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told, That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold. Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific—and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien. The name of Byron is at once associated with enthusiasm for Greece. True, it was modern Greece, but the only reason for that warm affection lay in the fervour of his admiration for the Greece of old. That “land of lost gods and godlike men” was to him a sacred land. Everyone knows his outburst touching the “isles of Greece.” But not everyone perceives how profoundly the mind of Byron had been stirred by the ancient ideals and influences. Not everyone perceives that his _Manfred_ is an unmistakable echo of Aeschylus’ _Prometheus_, in the tone and pitch of its composition, in the firmness of the central character, in his mental suffering, in the tremendous solitude, in the supernatural of the surroundings. Yet Byron is not one whom we may quote as typifying any great direct and salutary effect of Greek upon either his style or his matter. He is too slipshod in the one and too romantic in the other. But his ardour for the land of great literature is beyond denying: The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece! Where burning Sappho loved and sung, Where grew the arts of war and peace, Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung! Eternal summer gilds them yet, But all, except their sun, is set. The Scian and the Teian muse, The lover’s harp, the lover’s lute, Have found the fame your shores refuse: Their place of birth alone is mute To sounds which echo further west Than your sires’ “Islands of the Blest.” And where are they? and where art thou, My country? On thy voiceless shore The heroic lay is tuneless now— The heroic bosom beats no more! And must thy lyre, so long divine, Degenerate into hands like mine?