I Love Not Man The Less

From Canto IV, Stanza 178 of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1818), appearing in the same stanza as "There is a pleasure in the pathless woods." Byron clarifies that his retreat into nature is not misanthropy but a different kind of companionship — the universe itself offers a society that human society cannot. The stanza belongs to the Italian section of Canto IV, written in Venice and Rome during Byron's exile, and reflects his immersion in the Romantic conviction that nature restores what civilization diminishes.