***A wild striving to express a more inward and infinite
sense characterizes the works of every art. The music of Beethoven is
said, by those who understand it, to labor with vaster conceptions and
aspirations than music has attempted before. This feeling of the Infinite
has deeply colored the poetry of he period. This new love of the vast,
always native in Germany, was imported into France by De Stael, appeared in
England in Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley... and finds a most
genial climate in the American mind. Scott and Crabbe, who formed
themselves on the past, had none of this tendency; their poetry is
objective. In Byron, on the other hand, it predominates; but in Byron it
is blind, it sees not its true end - an infinite good, alive and beautiful, a
life nourished on absolute beatitudes, descending into Nature to behold itself
reflected there. His will is perverted, he worships the accidents of
society, and his praise of Nature is thieving and selfish.