Most of those who make the attempt are surprised--some of them troubled--at the discovery that the shrine can work miracles no more.

The Byron-fever is in fact a disease belonging to youth, as the hooping-cough to childhood,--working some occult good no doubt in the end.

It has its origin, perhaps, in the fact that the poet makes no demand either on the intellect or the conscience, but confines himself to friendly intercourse with those passions whose birth long precedes that of choice in their objects--whence a wealth of emotion is squandered.

It is long before we discover that far richer feeling is the result of a regard bent on the profound and the pure.
Hence the chief harm the poems did Alec, consisted in the rousing of his strongest feelings towards imaginary objects of inferior excellence, with the necessary result of a tendency to measure the worth of the passions themselves by their strength alone, and not by their character--by their degree, and not by their kind.

That they were the forge-bellows, supplying the blast of the imagination to the fire of love in which his life had begun to be remodelled, is not to be counted among their injurious influences.
He had never hitherto meddled with his own thoughts or feelings--had lived an external life to the most of his ability.