O'er steps of broken thrones and temples, Ye!
Whose agonies are evils of a day-
Their sceptre broken, and their sword in rust, | The cypress, hear the owl, and plod your way
Have yielded to the stranger: empty halls,
Thin streets, and foreign aspects, such as must
Too oft remind her who and what enthralls,
Have flung a desolate cloud o'er Venice'
lovely walls.
When Athens' armies fell at Syracuse,
A world is at our feet as fragile as our clay.
The Niobe of nations!" there she stands,
Childless and crownless, in her voiceless woe;
An empty urn within her withered hands,
And fettered thousands bore the yoke of war, Whose holy dust was scattered long ago;
Redemption rose up in the Attic Muse,12
Her voice their only ransom from afar;
See! as they chant the tragic hymn, the car
Of the o'ermastered victor stops, the reins
Fall from his hands, his idle scimitar
Starts from its belt-he rends his captive's
chains,
The Scipios' tomb contains no ashes now;
The very sepulchres lie tenantless
Of their heroic dwellers: dost thou flow,
Old Tiber! through a marble wilderness?
Rise, with thy yellow waves, and mantle her
distress.
And bids him thank the bard for freedom The Goth, the Christian, Time, War, Flood, and and his strains.
Thus, Venice, if no stronger claim were thine,
Were all thy proud historic deeds forgot,
Thy choral memory of the Bard divine,
Thy love of Tasso, should have cut the knot
Which ties thee to thy tyrants; and thy lot
Is shameful to the nations,-most of all,
Albion! to thee: the Ocean queen should not
Abandon Ocean's children; in the fall
Of Venice, think of thine, despite thy watery
wall.
I loved her from my boyhood; she to me
Was as a fairy city of the heart,
Rising like water-columns from the sea,
Of joy the sojourn, and of wealth the mart;
Have dealt upon the seven-hilled city's pride;
She saw her glories star by star expire,
And up the steep barbarian monarchs ride,
Where the car climbed the Capitol; far and
wide
Temple and tower went down, nor left a site:
Chaos of ruins! who shall trace the void,
O'er the dim fragments cast a lunar light,
And say, "here was, or is," where all is
doubly night?
The double night of ages, and of her,
Night's daughter, Ignorance, hath wrapt and
All round us; we but feel our way to err:
The Ocean hath his chart, the stars their map,
And Otway, Radcliffe,13 Schiller, 14 Shake-And Knowledge spreads them on her ample lap;
Had stamped her image in me, and even so,
Although I found her thus, we did not part,
Perchance even dearer in her day of woe,
Than when she was a boast, a marvel and a
show.
Oh Rome! my country! city of the soul
The orphans of the heart must turn to thee,
Lone mother of dead empires! and control
In their shut breasts their petty misery.
What are our woes and sufferance? Come and
12 It is said that the Athenian prisoners who could recite Euripides were set free. Cp. page 233, note 5.
13 In The Mysteries of Udolpho.
14 In The Ghost-Seer.
But Rome is as the desert, where we steer
Stumbling o'er recollections; now we clap
Our hands, and ery "Eureka!" "it is clear’—
When but some false mirage of ruin rises
Alas! the lofty city! and, alas,
The trebly hundred triumphs; and the day
When Brutus made the dagger's edge surpass
The Conqueror's sword in bearing fame away!
Alas, for Tully 's16 voice, and Virgil's lay,
And Livy's pictured page;-but these shall be
Her resurrection; all beside-decay.
Alas, for Earth, for never shall we see
That brightness in her eye she bore when
Rome was free!
15 The twelve children of Niobe were slain by
Apollo. They are the subject of a famous
ancient group of statuary.
16 Cicero's
Yet, Freedom! yet thy banner, torn but flying, But here, where Murder breathed her bloody
Streams like the thunder-storm against the
Thy trumpet voice, though broken now and dying,
The loudest still the tempest leaves behind;
here, where buzzing nations choked the ways,
roared or murmured like a mountain stream
Thy tree hath lost its blossoms, and the rind, Dashing or winding as its torrent strays:
Chopped by the axe, looks rough and little
Here, where the Roman million's blame or
Hath it indeed been plundered, or but cleared?
Alas! developed, opens the decay,
When the colossal fabric's form is neared:
It will not bear the brightness of the day,
Which streams too much on all years, man
have reft away.
The Congress of Vienna, the "Holy Alliance" (into which Wellington would not enter), and the Second Treaty of Paris.-E. H. Cole- 17 Suggested by the statue of The Dying Gaul, ridge. once supposed to represent a dying gladiator.
But when the rising moon begins to climb
Its topmost arch, and gently pauses there;
When the stars twinkle through the loops of
time,
And the low night-breeze waves along the air
The garland-forest, which the gray walls wear,
Like laurels on the bald first Cæsar's head; 18
When the light shines serene but doth not glare,
Then in this magic circle raise the dead:
Heroes have trod this spot-'tis on their dust
ye tread.
"While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand; "When falls the Coliseum Rome shall fall; "And when Rome falls-the World."
For earth's destruction thou dost all despise,
Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,
And send 'st him, shivering in thy playful spray
And howling, to his Gods, where haply lies
His petty hope in some near port or bay,
And dashest him again to earth:-there let
him lay.*
The armaments which thunderstrike the walk
Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake,
And monarchs tremble in their capitals,
The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make
Their clay creator the vain title take
Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war—
These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake,
They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar
Alike the Armada's pride or spoils of Tra-
falgar.
Thus spake the pilgrims o'er this mighty wall
In Saxon times, which we are wont to call
Ancient; and these three mortal things are still Thy shores are empires, changed in all save
On their foundations, and unaltered all;
Rome and her Ruin past Redemption's skill,
The World, the same wide den-of thieves,
or what ye will.
THE OCEAN. FROM CANTO IV
178
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all con-
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean-roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin-his control
Stops with the shore; upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,
When, for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and
His steps are not upon thy paths-thy fields
Are not a spoil for him,-thou dost arise
And shake him from thee; the vile strength
he wields
18 Cæsar was glad to cover his baldness with the wreath of laurel which the senate decreed he should wear.
And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy
Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be
Borne, like thy bubbles, onward; from a boy
I wantoned with thy breakers-they to me
Were a delight; and if the freshening sea
Made them a terror-'twas a pleasing fear,
For I was as it were a child of thee,
And trusted to thy billows far and near,
And laid my hand upon thy mane-as I do here.
*This grammatical error, occurring in so lofty a passage, is perhaps the most famous in our literature. It is quite characteristic of Byron's negligence or indifference.
THE SHIPWRECK. FROM CANTO II*
But now there came a flash of hope once more; Day broke, and the wind lulled: the masts were gone,
All this, the most were patient, and some bold,
Until the chains and leathers were worn through
Of all our pumps :-a wreck complete she rolled,
At mercy of the waves, whose mercies are
The leak increased; shoals round her, but no Like human beings' during civil war.
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