Cantos I and II of Child Harold's Pilgrimage were published in 1812, Cantos III and IV in 1818.
Child Harold is the embodiment of the alluring contradictions of the Byronic hero. He is a "gloomy wanderer", a romantic man of feeling, acquainted with sin, an outcast haunting Europe. He is a melancholy being, himself haunted by an unfulfilled love which mirrors the love Byron had for his half-sister.
He is doomed, in exile like Byron, surveying a human-created universe proudly aloof from the world, splendid, erotically attractive, in lonely isolation, self-reliant, defying the conventions of emerging bourgeois morality, admirable, noble but flawed in his rejection of society.
He has lived passionately and intensely, inventor of his own morality. He is the revolutionary personality who cannot "herd with men" or "submit/His thoughts to others", but lives instead the freedom of the "life within itself".
Finally, heroically, he stands alone by the eternal sea, which is unchangeable in contrast to the ruinous works of man.