beauty, there are lines in which he declares himself:

"... well pleased to recognize
In nature, and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thought, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being."

Byron's innate sophistication saves him from the ludicrous depths to
which Wordsworth sometimes fell, but he, too, is Rousseau's disciple,
a moral rebel, a highly personal and subjective poet of whom Goethe
said that he respected no law, human or divine, except that of the
three unities. Byron's verse is fascinating; it overflows with a sort
of desperate and fiery sincerity; but, as he himself says, his life
was one long strife of "passion with eternal law." He combines both
the romantic and the realistic elements of naturalism, both flames
with elemental passion and parades his cynicism, is forever snapping
his mood in _Don Juan_, alternating extravagant and romantic feeling
with lines of sardonic and purposely prosaic realism. Shelley is a
naturalist, too, not in the realm of sordid values but of Arcadian
fancy. The pre-Raphaelites belong here, together with a group of young
Englishmen who flourished between 1890 and 1914, of whom John Davidson
and Richard Middleton, both suicides, are striking examples. Poor
Middleton turned from naturalism to religion at the last. When he had
resolved on death, he wrote a message telling what he was about to do,
parting from his friend with brave assumption of serenity. But he did
not send the postcard, and in the last hour of that hired bedroom in
Brussels, with the bottle of chloroform before him, he traced across
the card's surface "a broken and a contrite spirit thou wilt not
despise." So there was humility at the last. One remembers rather