"DEAR LORD BYRON,--From the eagerness which I felt to make known my
opinions of your poem before others had expressed _any_ upon the
subject, I waited upon you to deliver my hasty, although hearty,
commendation. If it be worthy your acceptance, take it once more, in a
more deliberate form! Upon my arrival in town I found that Mathias
entirely coincided with me. 'Surely,' said I to him, 'Lord Byron, at
this time of life, cannot have experienced such keen anguish as those
exquisite allusions to what older men _may_ have felt seem to
denote!' This was his answer: 'I fear he has--he could not else
have written such a poem.' This morning I read the second canto with
all the attention it so highly merits, in the peace and stillness of
my study; and I am ready to confess I was never so much affected by
any poem, passionately fond of poetry as I have been from my earliest
youth....
"The eighth stanza, '_Yet if as holiest men_,' etc., has never been
surpassed. In the twenty-third, the sentiment is at variance with
Dryden:
'Strange cozenage! _none_ would live past years again.'
"And it is perhaps an instance wherein, for the first time, I found
not within my own breast an echo to your thought, for I would not '_be
once more a boy_;' but the generality of men will agree with you, and
wish to tread life's path again.
"In the twelfth stanza of the same canto, you might really add a very
curious note to these lines:
'Her sons too weak the sacred shrine to guard,
Yet felt some portion of their mother's pains,'
"by stating this fact: When the last of the Metopes was taken from the
Parthenon, and, in moving it, a great part of the superstructure with
one of the triglyphs, was thrown down by the work men whom Lord Elgin
employed, the Disdar, who beheld the mischief done to the building,
took his pipe out of his mouth, dropped a tear, and, in a supplicating
tone of voice, said to Lusieri--[Greek: Telos]! I was present at the
time.
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