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“If ever I smote as a man should smite,
if I struck one stroke that seem’d good in Thy sight,
by Thy loving mercy prevailing,
Lord! let her stand in the light of Thy face,
cloth’d with Thy love, and crown’d with Thy grace,
when I gnash my teeth in the terrible place
that is fill’d with weeping and wailing.”
This is splendid! His men, I say, are men, men such as we find in Byron. Orion (Satan) says that
“The angel Michael was once my foe;
He had a little the best of our strife,
yet he never could deal so stark a blow.”
The lover in “No Name,” thinking of meeting “the slayer of the soul” he loved, says:
“And I know that if, here or there, alone,
I found him fairly, and face to face,
having slain his body, I would slay my own,
that my soul to Satan his soul might chase:”
a remark in the strain of Heathcliff. Most of his lovers love passionately and sensuously, and only passionately and sensuously: The poet “revels in the rosy whiteness of that golden-headed girl:” if one thing is harder to forgive to a successful rival than another it is that