all their variety. Sentiment and passion, wit and humor, scorn and enthusiasm, all find expression in the ever-changing moods of the poem; and nowhere are the poet's amazing cleverness, eloquence, brilliance, and dash more lavishly employed.

Though primarily a satire, Don Juan is rich in sentiment. The episode of Haidée, which occupies more than two cantos, is narrated with abundance of sympathy, and Byron shows genuine tenderness for his creation. And, at intervals throughout the whole book, the cynicism and the satire are dropped, and delicate and touching stanzas occur, finer in texture than the exaggerated emotions of his early work.

Oh, Hesperus! thou bringest all good things -
Home to the weary, to the hungry cheer,
To the young bird the parent's brooding wings,
The welcome stall to the o'erlabour'd steer;
Whate'er of peace about our hearthstone clings,
Whate'er our household gods protect of dear,
Are gather'd round us by thy look of rest;
Thou bring'st the child, too, to the mother's breast.

(Canto III, st. cvii.)

Sentiment, I think, is the right word for the sympathetic emotion in this poem as a whole; for though he describes raptures galore, I do not feel that the emotional intensity of the love scenes ever really rises to passion. Vivid and brilliant as is his imagination in the picturing of the relations of Juan and the pirate's daughter, the degree of intensity is lower than that exhibited on the satirical side of his work; and he damns the hypocrisy of the English with more real zest than he sings the charm of the lovely Greek. Take a stanza or two as near to the height of passion as the poem ever rises:

She loved, and was beloved - she adored,

And she was worshipp'd; after nature's fashion,
Their intense souls, into each other pour'd,
If souls could die, had perish'd in that passion,
But by degrees their senses were restored,
Again to be o'ercome, again to dash on ;
And, beating 'gainst his bosom, Haidée's heart
Felt as if never more to beat apart....

And now 't was done - on the lone shore were plighted
Their hearts; the stars, their nuptial torches, shed
Beauty upon the beautiful they lighted :
Ocean their witness, and the cave their bed,
By their own feelings hallow'd and united,
Their priest was Solitude, and they were wed:
And they were happy, for to their young eyes
Each was an angel, and earth paradise.

(Canto II, st. cxci, cciv.)

If the reader does not at once perceive the limitation in such passages as these which forces us to call the feeling they rouse in the reader sentiment rather than passion, let him call to mind Shakespeare's treatment of the same theme (for, of course, Byron is seeking to describe passion in the lovers), and repeat to himself Juliet's lines beginning

Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,

or Romeo's on his first sight of Juliet,

O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright, and the distinction here insisted on will become immediately apparent. Both Byron's and Shakespeare's stories end disastrously; but because of this difference Haidée's death closes a pathetic idyll, Juliet's a great tragedy.

There are several reasons why the non-satirical parts of Don Juan, like the romantic tales of Byron, fail to reach the level of the great poems of passion. One is that Byron's imagination, though active, was not capable of the loftiest flights, and did not operate with the intensity required to kindle his reader to the highest degree of rapture. Byron was surely a poet, and he was a great writer; but his greatness as a writer rests upon much besides purely poetical qualities. He is one more proof (as Landor, we saw, was also) that a theme dealing with passion, and a passionate personality in the poet, do not necessarily produce passionate poetry. Another reason is the pervading spirit of satire in the poem as a whole. Through descriptions of scenery, wild adventure, and tender emotion, the satirical spirit is ever hovering in the background, never long out of sight. Byron had found out his sentimental weakness and, in his determination never to be laughed at for it again, he is prompt to laugh first. This had a good and a bad effect: the sentiment in Don Juan is never allowed to become sentimentalism; neither can it ever rise to genuine passion. A single instance will recall the almost mechanical device by which these results come about:

"Farewell, my Spain! a long farewell!" he cried,
"Perhaps I may revisit thee no more,
But die, as many an exiled heart hath died,

Of its own thirst to see again thy shore :
Farewell, where Guadalquiver's waters glide !
Farewell, my mother! and, since all is o'er,
Farewell, too, dearest Julia!"
(here he drew
Her letter out again, and read it through.)

"And oh! if e'er I should forget, I swear
But that's impossible, and cannot be
Sooner shall this blue ocean melt to air,
Sooner shall earth resolve itself to sea,
Than I resign thine image, oh, my fair !
Or think of anything, excepting thee;
A mind diseased no remedy can physic"
(Here the ship gave a lurch, and he grew sea-sick.)

(Canto II, st. xviii, xix.)

Sentimentalism and sustained passion are equally impossible in a tale narrated in this spirit and by these methods. By these methods, then, and at this cost, did Byron free himself from the vice of sentimentalism.

Before closing our discussion of this quality, it seems worth while to add a word on the relation of sentimentalism to what is known as sensationalism in art. We have seen that the former is due to the cultivation of the tender feelings for the sake of a personal emotional satisfaction; the latter is a parallel tendency which seeks emotional excitement by the cultivation of the grosser feelings. Not the pathos of delicate sensibility, but the shock from violent external incident is the material of the sensationalist. Horror, terror, frightful suspense, crude supernaturalism, bloodshed, crime, these and their like does he accumulate, not in the realist's zeal to tell the whole truth about human life, nor in the romanticist's vision of the awe-inspiring elements which may form the motives or the consequences of human action; but in a determination to thrill at all costs. As a defective form of art, it is not fundamentally different from sentimental