[308] [Historical events may be thrown into the form of prophecy with some security, but not so the critical opinions of the _soi-disani_ prophet. If Byron had lived half a century later, he might have placed Ariosto and Tasso after and not before Petrarch.] [ck] _Was crimsoned with his veins who died to save,_ _Shall be his glorious argument,_----.--[MS, Alternative reading.] [309] {266}[See the Introduction to the _Lament of Tasso_, _ante_, p. 139, and _Childe Harold_, Canto IV. stanza xxxvi. line 2, _Poetical Works_, 1899, ii. 355, note 1.] [310] [Alfonso d'Este (II.), Duke of Ferrara, died 1597.] [311] [Compare the opening lines of the _Orlando Furioso_-- "Le Donne, i Cavalier'! l'arme, gli amori, Le Cortesie, l'audaci imprese io canto." See _Childe Harold_, Canto IV. stanzas xl., xli., _Poetical Works_, 1899, ii. 359, 360, note 1.] [312] [The sense is, "Ariosto may be matched with, perhaps excelled by, Homer; but where is the Greek poet to set on the same pedestal with Tasso?"] [313] [Compare _Churchill's Grave_, lines 15-19-- "And is this all? I thought,--and do we rip The veil of Immortality, and crave I know not what of honour and of light Through unborn ages, to endure this blight? So soon, and so successless?" _Vide ante_, p. 47.] [cl] {267} / _winged_ \ _The_ < > _blood_----.--[MS. Alternative reading.] \ _lightning_ / [314] [Compare-- "For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise." _Kubla Khan,_ lines 52, 53, _Poetical Works_. of S. T. Coleridge, 1893, p. 94.] [315] [Compare-- "By our own spirits are we deified: We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness." _Resolution and Independence_, vii. lines 5-7, Wordsworth's _Poetical Works_, 1889, p. 175. Compare, too, Moore's fine apology for Byron's failure to submit to the yoke of matrimony, "and to live happily ever afterwards"-- "But it is the cultivation and exercise of the imaginative faculty that, more than anything, tend to wean the man of genius from actual life, and, by substituting the sensibilities of the imagination for those of the heart, to render, at last, the medium through which he feels no less unreal than that through which he thinks. Those images of ideal good and beauty that surround him in his musings soon accustom him to consider all that is beneath this high standard unworthy of his care; till, at length, the heart becoming chilled as the fancy warms, it too often happens that, in proportion as he has refined and elevated his theory of all the social affections, he has unfitted himself for the practice of them."--_Life_, p. 268.]