Twelve Centuries of English Poetry and Prose

And bids him thank the bard for freedom The Goth, the Christian, Time, War, Flood, and

and his strains.

Fire,

Have dealt upon the seven-hilled city's pride;
She saw her glories star by star expire,

Thus, Venice, if no stronger claim were thine, And up the steep barbarian monarchs ride,
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

Where the car climbed the Capitol; far and
wide

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;
And Otway, Radcliffe, 13 Schiller, 14 Shake-

speare's art,

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.

ROME. FROM CANTO IV

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

see

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

wrap

All round us; we but feel our way to err:
The Ocean hath his chart, the stars their map,
And Knowledge spreads them on her ample lap;
But Rome is as the desert, where we steer
Stumbling o'er recollections; now we clap
Our hands, and cry "Eureka!” "it is clear"-
When but some false mirage of ruin rises

near.

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!

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.

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

steam:

wind;

Thy trumpet voice, though broken now and dying,

And here, where buzzing nations choked the ways,

The loudest still the tempest leaves behind;

Thy tree hath lost its blossoms, and the rind, Dashing or winding as its torrent strays:

And roared or murmured like a mountain stream

Chopped by the axe, looks rough and little

worth,

Here, where the Roman million's blame or praise

But the sap lasts, and still the seed we find
Sown deep, even in the bosom of the North;
So shall a better spring less bitter fruit
bring forth.

Was death or life, the playthings of a crowd,
My voice sounds much-and fall the stars'

faint rays

cause

THE COLISEUM. FROM CANTO IV

139

And here the buzz of eager nations ran,
In murmured pity, or loud-roared applause,

As man was slaughtered by his fellow-man,

And wherefore slaughtered? wherefore, but be- Yet oft the enormous skeleton ye pass,

Such were the bloody Circus' genial laws,
And the imperial pleasure.---Wherefore not?
What matters where we fall to fill the maws
Of worms-on battle-plains or listed spot?

Both are but theatres where the chief actors

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.

rot.

* 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. 18 Cæsar was glad to cover his baldness with the wreath of laurel which the senate decreed he should wear.

On the arena void-seats crushed, walls bowedAnd galleries, where my steps seem echoes strangely loud.

143

A ruin-yet what ruin! from its mass
Walls, palaces, half-cities, have been reared;

And marvel where the spoil could have appeared.

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.*

181

The armaments which thunderstrike the wall
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.

182

Thy shores are empires, changed in all save theeAssyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they? Thy waters washed them power while they were free,

And many a tyrant since; their shores obey The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay Has dried up realms to deserts: not so thou;Unchangeable, save to thy wild waves' play, Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow:

Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest

now.

183

Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's

form

Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,-
Calm or convulsed, in breeze, or gale, or storm,
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime
Dark-heaving-boundless, endless, and sublime,
The image of eternity, the throne
Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime
The monsters of the deep are made; each zone
Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread, fathom-
less, alone.

184

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.

1 wove in bits of rope-yarn (usually done to prevent chafing)

* Don Juan, with his servants and his tutor Pedrillo, meets with shipwreck in the Mediterranean.

Then came the carpenter, at last, with tears
In his rough eyes, and told the captain he
Could do no more: he was a man in years,
And long had voyaged through many a
stormy sea,

And if he wept at length, they were not fears
That made his eyelids as a woman's be,
But he, poor fellow, had a wife and children,-
Two things for dying people quite bewildering.

The ship was evidently settling now

Fast by the head; and, all distinction gone, Some went to prayers again, and made a vow Of candles to their saints-but there were

none

To pay them with; and some looked o'er the bow;

Some hoisted out the boats; and there was

one

That begged Pedrillo for an absolution,
Who told him to be damned-in his confusion.

Some lashed them in their hammocks; some

put on

Their best clothes, as if going to a fair; Some cursed the day on which they saw the Sun, And gnashed their teeth, and, howling, tore their hair;

And others went on as they had begun, Getting the boats out, being well aware That a tight boat will live in a rough sea, Unless with breakers close beneath her lee.

The worst of all was, that in their condition, Having been several days in great distress, 'T was difficult to get out such provision As now might render their long suffering less:

Men, even when dying, dislike inanition;

Their stock was damaged by the weather's

stress:

Two casks of biscuit and a keg of butter
Were all that could be thrown into the cutter.

That still could keep afloat the struggling tars, For yet they strove, although of no great use: There was no light in heaven but a few stars, The boats put off o'ercrowded with their crews;

She gave a heel, and then a lurch to port, And, going down head-foremost-sunk, in short.

Then rose from sea to sky the wild farewellThen shrieked the timid, and stood still the

brave

Then some leaped overboard with dreadful yell,
As eager to anticipate their grave;
And the sea yawned around her like a hell,
And down she sucked with her the whirling
wave,

Like one who grapples with his enemy,
a And strives to strangle him before he die.

And first one universal shriek there rushed,
Louder than the loud ocean, like a crash
Of echoing thunder; and then all was hushed,
Save the wild wind and the remorseless (lash
Of billows; but at intervals there gushed,
Accompanied with a convulsive splash,
A solitary shriek, the bubbling cry
Of some strong swimmer in his agony.

THE ISLES OF GREECE. FROM CANTO III* 78

And now they were diverted by their suite, Dwarfs, dancing girls, black eunuchs, and a poet,

Which made their new establishment complete; The last was of great fame, and liked to show it;

His verses rarely wanted their due feet

And for his theme-he seldom sung below it, He being paid to satirize or flatter, As the psalm says, “inditing a good matter."

He praised the present, and abused the past, Reversing the good custom of old days, An Eastern anti-jacobin1 at last

He turned, preferring pudding to praise2

For some few years his lot had been o'ercast
By his seeming independent in his lays,
But now he sung the Sultan and the Pacha
With truth like Southey, and with verse like
Crashaw.3

He was a man who had seen many changes, And always changed as true as any needle; His polar star being one which rather ranges,

1 Anti-revolutionary, anti-democratic. 2 See Pope The Dunciad, 52.

3 Southey, as poet laureate, flattered royalty. The name of Crashaw serves chiefly for a rhyme. * Juan and Haidée, the daughter of Lambro, a pirate, and lord of one of the Grecian isles, hold a feast in Lambro's halls during his absence.

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