refuge by the waves of the Adriatic, "like the stag at bay who betakes himself to the waters."

He now turned out a large amount of poetry, including the remaining cantos of Child Harold, Cain, Manfred, and Don Juan. Then he seemed to weary of writing. He lacked the capacity for sustained effort at anything. Poetry he decided was not his vocation. He longed for action, and a field for heroic adventure opened immediately to his view.

The Greeks were struggling to throw off the Turkish yoke. In 1823, Byron chartered a ship at Genoa and set sail for the theatre of war. The Greeks welcomed their distinguished volunteer with great acclaim. With his usual inconsistency, Byron showed little real respect for these Greeks whose cause he was now enthusiasti cally advancing. Yet he brought with him to Missolonghi 4,000 pounds ($20,000) of his own personal loan. "The people in the streets," wrote Stanhope, "are looking forward to his lordship's arrival as they would to the coming of a Messiah." He was received with salvoes of musketry and triumphal music, and was given the freedom of the city. He strove manfully to end the internal dissensions in Greece, in order that the leaders might present a united front to the Turks.

Finally, it was arranged that Byron should assume the post of commander-in-chief of an expedition against Lepanto. But the hand of death was already upon him. On his thirty-sixth birthday, while still at Missolonghi, he wrote:

"If thou regret'st thy youth, why live?

The land of honorable death

Is here ..

Then look around, and choose thy ground

And take thy rest."

Stricken with illness before he could get into action, in his delirium he fancied he was leading his troops on to the charge at Lepanto. "Forward, forward!" he called to his phantom legions. Then the fire of life slowly flickered out, like the flame in a dying coal. "Now I shall go to sleep," he murmured to a faithful attendant. These were his final words.

ocean.

The tides of literary reputation ebb and flow like those of the The tremendous impact of Byron's fame in the flood tide of his literary popularity is difficult for us to realize, now that the tide has been ebbing so long. To his own generation, Byron was 1 Byron's literary reputation is still very high on the Continent.

an inspired spokesman. In masculine and, though declamatory, none the less powerful speech he voiced the chaotic yearnings and strivings of his day-its passion for liberty, its despairs, its doubts and questionings, its blind gropings toward new ideals and new valAll the strength and all the weakness of his generation are found in Byron.

And it is just because his was the voice of his generation that it lacked the quality which transcends time, and echoes so faintly in the ears of a generation busied with other problems. Byron was not a Shakespeare, but he was supremely himself, in all his virtues. and all his vices. His work, dashing, brilliant, effective, and rich in content as it is, is marred by faults of technique and displays. marked inequalities in merit. His thoughts welled out faster than he could put them down, and if he paused he could not recapture the fleeting mood. And so he is careless of form, of finish, of detail, and at times even of grammar.

'He is the poet of the mountain-peak, the sea, and the tempest. A contempt for his fellow-men mingles curiously with his love of nature and her solitudes. Unlike Wordsworth, he does not efface himself in her presence, but finds a congenial spirit in her moods of fierceness and of power."

The tumult of his own life and emotions is mirrored in his verse, which he made "the memorial of his imperious and colossal egotism." His heroes follow the same general type and are born of his own personality. They are not chastened by suffering. "They stand solitary in the midst of the sufferings of the world, in their own woes, sullen and defiant until the last."

Byron's ideal of freedom was not the freedom dreamed of by philosophers and by the political leaders of oppressed peoples. It was largely a concept of personal license. "I have simplified my politics," Byron confided, "into an utter detestation of all existing governments."

It was Byron's lack of any constructive social faith, any vision of a redeemed and uplifted humanity such as inspired Shelley, that makes his reputation a tarnished thing today. But the striking force and beauty of many a passage in his writings will give enjoyment to lovers of literature as long as English is a living tongue.

AN INTERPRETER OF DESTINY

EDWIN MILLER WHEELOCK AND THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES

BY CHARLES KASSEL

HE corridors of time resound with the clangor of the battle

of philosophy and which proclaim

the utter freedom of men and movements on the stage of history and those schools which view the experiences of peoples and races as a mighty drama, cast by some supernal intelligence, and whose course and climax are fixed by inevitable law. The surge of the conflict, back and forth, as the one system or the other rose to the ascendant, has left an ineffaceable impress upon thought and character, and the annals of the past sufficiently reveal how subtly each belief works up into individual life and conduct.

Scientifically, the question is insoluble. It reaches farther back into the history of being than science penetrates. In religion, it occupies a region where faith and not reason is the arbiter and where each sect guides its groping way by the word of some inspired page or prophet. It is in the realm of philosophy alone, upon this overshadowing problem, that the eager mind finds measurable scope for exercise.

Back of the whole world-story, with its magnificent panorama of evolution, this question may lie. The last two decades have widened incalculably our thought of the evolutionary process. The revelations of the spectroscope, the latest triumphs of the chemical and physical laboratories, and, above all, the apocalyptic splendor of radio-activity, have disclosed to us a vision of growth and becoming which embraces not only the animate creation as we have hitherto known it but the very metals and crystals and even the atoms of the material fabric about and beneath us.

The scientist today sees with larger eyes than in the days gone by. He thinks of all matter as the outflowering, in all likelihood, of one primordial substance, and he even wonders whether all life as well may not reach back to a mother-element in the cosmic prime. Peering within the atom, until recently deemed simple and indivisible, he finds the electron sweeping with incredible swiftness its orbit about the nucleus in the infinitesimal system, forming as it does a miniature of the solar scheme, and the imposing thought drives in upon him that the atomic order may be the type and symbol of the cosmos itself, with suns and planets as units of galaxies, and these of larger clusters still. Upon this theory the whole visible universe, with others trillions of miles distant, may form a grand system, rolling, through inconceivable ranges of time, about some sublime center.

That the bewildering profusion of worlds may be thus a slow blossoming in space and time, through measureless ages, of a preexisting Idea, with a principle of growth, unfoldment and decay ingermed and fixed, is neither new nor unwelcome to the philosophic mind, but heretofore we have rebelled against the thought of such a process in the evolution of the animate creation and in the history. of man. If we assume, however, that the starry hosts are a harmonious whole, wrought forth in the loom of creation according to a set pattern and to be unravelled and rewoven when some huge cycle is done, we shall find it hard to deny that the course of life and history itself may have been foresketched in outline from the beginning, leaving only the details to the play of secondary causes, including the volition of man.

It is just here we encounter the seemingly hopeless conflict between the idea of necessity and the idea of free will. To solve the difficulty will require a deeper knowledge, and perhaps a higher order of mind, than the race possesses as yet. It may well be, however, that we have made too much, in our philosophic thinking, of free will and moral responsibility. Libertarian in every direction, political, religious and social alike, and disposed to exalt the principle of freedom in all merely human relations, our dislike for the doctrines of the necessitarians may spring from our bias and not from our reason.

In reality, the will to good may be the synonym of the highest freedom, and the will or proneness to evil, where it exists, the badge and measure of its absence. If, because of an invincible revulsion, we are definitely incapable of a heinous act, our moral responsibility may be less, but our freedom, in spite of the seeming paradox, may be greater. For a solution of such questions, fundamental though they are, we must await an illumination beyond us at present. As

with the conceptions of infinity in space and eternity in time, the mind thus far is without the material, and perhaps without the machinery, for reaching a conclusion.

Meanwhile, none the less, the thought is an admissible one that, if such things as Fate and Destiny exist, exceptional natures may not be without the faculty for catching their secret whispers. We can not say that we have sounded to its depths the mystery of mind. Sealed away in the hidden places of the subconscious may lie unexplored chambers, filled with treasures richer than any Pharaoh's, and whose full opening awaits some unknown hour in the history of

man.

Even the sober scientist in these latter days, seeing all things in a new and magic light, is ready to believe that in the realm of mind may lie as many marvels as the new century has unveiled in the domain of matter. It was a startling suggestion of John Burroughs, in his "Sheaf of Nature Notes," published in the North American Review for September, 1920, shortly before his death, that the mysterious instincts in the insect and lesser animal world may be in reality senses of a psychic order, "and that in what we call telepathy we get hints of the same thing among ourselves." Nor is it without significance that the great naturalist should have reserved for so late an hour the utterance of a thought which must have been long in his mind.

"It seems certain," says J. Arthur Thomson, in his Introduction to Science (Home University Library, p. 230), “that in many fields there are men with a remarkable power of intuition, born not made, of whose methods even self-analysis can give no account." Such a pronouncement would not have been possible to a distinguished scientist of the earlier day and it is a striking commentary upon the mystical tinge in modern scientific thinking that this statement should have come from the same hand which, in the recently-published Outline of Science, has given to the world a work unique and unrivalled in its field-an authoritative exposition of all the sciences with their interrelations, told in language of majestic simplicity and beauty.

In the issues of the present magazine for September, 1920, February and July, 1922, and March, August and December, 1923, we saw that Edwin Miller Wheelock was not only a writer of remarkable gifts, and a courageous champion of intellectual freedom, but that he belonged to an order of men who look clearly into the future where measures and movements are concerned which make a supreme appeal to their natures. Von Holst, as we found, had, by