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Byron commends Hodgson's verses, and encourages him to write; Hodgson recognizes in the Bards and Reviewers and the early cantos of Childe Harold the promise of Manfred and Cain. Among the associates who strove to bring the poet back to the anchorage of fixed belief, and to wean him from the error of his thoughts, Francis Hodgson was the most charitable, and therefore the most judicious.
Byron, in his Childe Harold, Canto II., alludes to the story of Arion, when, describing his voyage, he represents one of the seamen making music to entertain the rest: "The moon is up; by Heaven, a lovely eve! Long streams of light o'er dancing waves expand; Now lads on shore may sigh and maids believe; Such be our fate when we return to land!
"This has always been, next to the East, the greenest island of my imagination, and it has not disappointed me." They are considerably taken up with love affairs of an irregular kind, and contain also many vivid pictures of Venetian society and manners. "Manfred" was completed in 1817, and was followed by the fourth canto of "Childe Harold."
It would fain blot out his life and much of his poetry if, without them, it could preserve the best and grandest of his writings, that ill-disguised autobiography which goes by the name of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," in which he soars to loftier flights than any English poet from Milton to his own time.
But I am not sure that the description of Sir Roland's tantalised vigil in the Vale of St. Nor do I think that the actual adventures of this Childe Roland in the dark towers are inferior. The trials and temptations are of stock material, but all the best matter is stock, and this is handled with a rush and dash which more than saves it.
It was the first burst of that dark, diseased ichor, which afterwards coloured his effusions; the overflowing suppuration of that satiety and loathing, which rendered Childe Harold, in particular, so original, incomprehensible, and antisocial; and bears testimony to the state of his feelings at that important epoch, while he was yet upon the threshold of the world, and was entering it with a sense of failure and humiliation, and premature disgust.
In the morning of the 3rd of October they set out for Arta, with ten horses; four for themselves and servants, four for their luggage, and two for two soldiers whom they were induced to take with them as guards. Byron takes no notice of his visit to Arta in Childe Harold; but Mr Hobhouse has given a minute account of the town. They met there with nothing remarkable.
After all this he called for the fiddles and books, and we two and W. Howe, and Mr. Childe, did sing and play some psalmes of Will. Lawes's, and some songs; and so I went away. So I went to see my Lord's picture, which is almost done, and do please me very well. Hence to Whitehall to find out Mr.
The last days at Ashestiel were marked by a friendly interchange of letters with Lord Byron, whose "Childe Harold" had just come out, and with correspondence with Johanna Baillie and with Crabbe. At Whitsuntide the family, which included two boys and two girls, moved to their new possession, and structural alterations on the farmhouse began. The poem "Rokeby" appeared in January, 1813.
Oddly enough it has been one of the poems about which most of those pedantic and trivial questions have been asked, which are asked invariably by those who treat Browning as a science instead of a poet, "What does the poem of 'Childe Roland' mean?" The only genuine answer to this is, "What does anything mean?" Does the earth mean nothing?
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