The following sections of this BookRags Literature Study Guide is offprint from Gale's For Students Series: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Works: Introduction, Author Biography, Plot Summary, Characters, Themes, Style, Historical Context, Critical Overview, Criticism and Critical Essays, Media Adaptations, Topics for Further Study, Compare & Contrast, What Do I Read Next?, For Further Study, and Sources.
(c)1998-2002; (c)2002 by Gale. Gale is an imprint of The Gale Group, Inc., a division of Thomson Learning, Inc. Gale and Design and Thomson Learning are trademarks used herein under license.
The following sections, if they exist, are offprint from Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: "Social Concerns", "Thematic Overview", "Techniques", "Literary Precedents", "Key Questions", "Related Titles", "Adaptations", "Related Web Sites". (c)1994-2005, by Walton Beacham.
The following sections, if they exist, are offprint from Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults: "About the Author", "Overview", "Setting", "Literary Qualities", "Social Sensitivity", "Topics for Discussion", "Ideas for Reports and Papers". (c)1994-2005, by Walton Beacham.
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Not in those climes where I have
late been straying,
Though Beauty long hath there been
matchless deemed,
Not in those visions to the heart
displaying
Forms which it sighs but to have
only dreamed,
Hath aught like thee in truth or
fancy seemed:
Nor, having seen thee, shall I vainly
seek
To paint those charms which varied
as they beamed —
To such as see thee not my words
were weak;
To those who gaze on thee, what language could they
speak?
Ah! mayst thou ever be what now
thou art,
Nor unbeseem the promise of thy
spring,
As fair in form, as warm yet pure
in heart,
Love’s image upon earth without
his wing,
And guileless beyond Hope’s
imagining!
And surely she who now so fondly
rears
Thy youth, in thee, thus hourly
brightening,
Beholds the rainbow of her future
years,
Before whose heavenly hues all sorrow disappears.
Young Peri of the West!—’tis
well for me
My years already doubly number thine;
My loveless eye unmoved may gaze
on thee,
And safely view thy ripening beauties
shine:
Happy, I ne’er shall see them
in decline;
Happier, that while all younger
hearts shall bleed
Mine shall escape the doom thine
eyes assign
To those whose admiration shall
succeed,
But mixed with pangs to Love’s even loveliest
hours decreed.
Oh! let that eye, which, wild as
the gazelle’s,
Now brightly bold or beautifully
shy,
Wins as it wanders, dazzles where
it dwells,
Glance o’er this page, nor
to my verse deny
That smile for which my breast might
vainly sigh,
Could I to thee be ever more than
friend:
This much, dear maid, accord; nor
question why
To one so young my strain I would
commend,
But bid me with my wreath one matchless lily blend.
Such is thy name with this my verse
entwined;
And long as kinder eyes a look shall
cast
On Harold’s page, Ianthe’s
here enshrined
Shall thus be first beheld, forgotten
last:
My days once numbered, should this
homage past
Attract thy fairy fingers near the
lyre
Of him who hailed thee, loveliest
as thou wast,
Such is the most my memory may desire;
Though more than Hope can claim, could Friendship
less require?
CANTO THE FIRST.
Oh, thou, in Hellas deemed of heavenly
birth,
Muse, formed or fabled at the minstrel’s
will!
Since shamed full oft by later lyres
on earth,
Mine dares not call thee from thy
sacred hill:
Yet there I’ve wandered by
thy vaunted rill;
Yes! sighed o’er Delphi’s
long-deserted shrine
Where, save that feeble fountain,
all is still;
Nor mote my shell awake the weary
Nine
To grace so plain a tale—this lowly lay
of mine.
Whilome in Albion’s isle there
dwelt a youth,
Who ne in virtue’s ways did
take delight;
But spent his days in riot most
uncouth,
And vexed with mirth the drowsy
ear of Night.
Ah, me! in sooth he was a shameless
wight,
Sore given to revel and ungodly
glee;
Few earthly things found favour
in his sight
Save concubines and carnal companie,
And flaunting wassailers of high and low degree.
Childe Harold was he hight:
—but whence his name
And lineage long, it suits me not
to say;
Suffice it, that perchance they
were of fame,
And had been glorious in another
day:
But one sad losel soils a name for
aye,
However mighty in the olden time;
Nor all that heralds rake from coffined
clay,
Nor florid prose, nor honeyed lines
of rhyme,
Can blazon evil deeds, or consecrate a crime.
Childe Harold basked him in the
noontide sun,
Disporting there like any other
fly,
Nor deemed before his little day
was done
One blast might chill him into misery.
But long ere scarce a third of his
passed by,
Worse than adversity the Childe
befell;
He felt the fulness of satiety:
Then loathed he in his native land
to dwell,
Which seemed to him more lone than eremite’s
sad cell.
For he through Sin’s long
labyrinth had run,
Nor made atonement when he did amiss,
Had sighed to many, though he loved
but one,
And that loved one, alas, could
ne’er be his.
Ah, happy she! to ’scape from
him whose kiss
Had been pollution unto aught so
chaste;
Who soon had left her charms for
vulgar bliss,
And spoiled her goodly lands to
gild his waste,
Nor calm domestic peace had ever deigned to taste.
And now Childe Harold was sore sick
at heart,
And from his fellow bacchanals would
flee;
’Tis said, at times the sullen
tear would start,
But pride congealed the drop within
his e’e:
Apart he stalked in joyless reverie,
And from his native land resolved
to go,
And visit scorching climes beyond
the sea;
With pleasure drugged, he almost
longed for woe,
And e’en for change of scene would seek the
shades below.
The Childe departed from his father’s
hall;
It was a vast and venerable pile;
So old, it seemed only not to fall,
Yet strength was pillared in each
massy aisle.
Monastic dome! condemned to uses
vile!
Where superstition once had made
her den,
Now Paphian girls were known to
sing and smile;
And monks might deem their time
was come agen,
If ancient tales say true, nor wrong these holy men.
Yet ofttimes in his maddest mirthful
mood,
Strange pangs would flash along
Childe Harold’s brow,
As if the memory of some deadly
feud
Or disappointed passion lurked below:
But this none knew, nor haply cared
to know;
For his was not that open, artless
soul
That feels relief by bidding sorrow
flow;
Nor sought he friend to counsel
or condole,
Whate’er this grief mote be, which he could
not control.
And none did love him: though
to hall and bower
He gathered revellers from far and
near,
He knew them flatterers of the festal
hour;
The heartless parasites of present
cheer.
Yea, none did love him—not
his lemans dear —
But pomp and power alone are woman’s
care,
And where these are light Eros finds
a feere;
Maidens, like moths, are ever caught
by glare,
And Mammon wins his way where seraphs might despair.
Childe Harold had a mother—not
forgot,
Though parting from that mother
he did shun;
A sister whom he loved, but saw
her not
Before his weary pilgrimage begun:
If friends he had, he bade adieu
to none.
Yet deem not thence his breast a
breast of steel;
Ye, who have known what ’tis
to dote upon
A few dear objects, will in sadness
feel
Such partings break the heart they fondly hope to
heal.
His house, his home, his heritage,
his lands,
The laughing dames in whom he did
delight,
Whose large blue eyes, fair locks,
and snowy hands,
Might shake the saintship of an
anchorite,
And long had fed his youthful appetite;
His goblets brimmed with every costly
wine,
And all that mote to luxury invite,
Without a sigh he left to cross
the brine,
And traverse Paynim shores, and pass earth’s
central line.
The sails were filled, and fair
the light winds blew
As glad to waft him from his native
home;
And fast the white rocks faded from
his view,
And soon were lost in circumambient
foam;
And then, it may be, of his wish
to roam
Repented he, but in his bosom slept
The silent thought, nor from his
lips did come
One word of wail, whilst others
sate and wept,
And to the reckless gales unmanly moaning kept.
But when the sun was sinking in
the sea,
He seized his harp, which he at
times could string,
And strike, albeit with untaught
melody,
When deemed he no strange ear was
listening:
And now his fingers o’er it
he did fling,
And tuned his farewell in the dim
twilight,
While flew the vessel on her snowy
wing,
And fleeting shores receded from
his sight,
Thus to the elements he poured his last ‘Good
Night.’
Adieu, adieu! my native shore
Fades o’er the waters blue;
The night-winds sigh, the breakers roar,
And shrieks the wild sea-mew.
Yon sun that sets upon the sea
We follow in his flight;
Farewell awhile to him and thee,
My Native Land—Good Night!
A few short hours, and he will rise
To give the morrow birth;
And I shall hail the main and skies,
But not my mother earth.
Deserted is my own good hall,
Its hearth is desolate;
Wild weeds are gathering on the wall,
My dog howls at the gate.
’Come hither, hither, my little page:
Why dost thou weep and wail?
Or dost thou dread the billow’s rage,
Or tremble at the gale?
But dash the tear-drop from thine eye,
Our ship is swift and strong;
Our fleetest falcon scarce can fly
More merrily along.’
’Let winds be shrill, let waves roll high,
I fear not wave nor wind;
Yet marvel not, Sir Childe, that I
Am sorrowful in mind;
For I have from my father gone,
A mother whom I love,
And have no friend, save these alone,
But thee—and One above.
’My father blessed me fervently,
Yet did not much complain;
But sorely will my mother sigh
Till I come back again.’ —
’Enough, enough, my little lad!
Such tears become thine eye;
If I thy guileless bosom had,
Mine own would not be dry.
’Come hither, hither, my staunch yeoman,
Why dost thou look so pale?
Or dost thou dread a French foeman,
Or shiver at the gale?’ —
’Deem’st thou I tremble for my life?
Sir Childe, I’m not so weak;
But thinking on an absent wife
Will blanch a faithful cheek.
’My spouse and boys dwell near thy hall,
Along the bordering lake;
And when they on their father call,
What answer shall she make?’
—
’Enough, enough, my yeoman good,
Thy grief let none gainsay;
But I, who am of lighter mood,
Will laugh to flee away.’
For who would trust the seeming sighs
Of wife or paramour?
Fresh feeres will dry the bright blue eyes
We late saw streaming o’er.
For pleasures past I do not grieve,
Nor perils gathering near;
My greatest grief is that I leave
No thing that claims a tear.
And now I’m in the world alone,
Upon the wide, wide sea;
But why should I for others groan,
When none will sigh for me?
Perchance my dog will whine in vain
Till fed by stranger hands;
But long ere I come back again
He’d tear me where he stands.
With thee, my bark, I’ll swiftly go
Athwart the foaming brine;
Nor care what land thou bear’st me to,
So not again to mine.
Welcome, welcome, ye dark blue waves!
And when you fail my sight,
Welcome, ye deserts, and ye caves!
My Native Land—Good Night!
On, on the vessel flies, the land
is gone,
And winds are rude in Biscay’s
sleepless bay.
Four days are sped, but with the
fifth, anon,
New shores descried make every bosom
gay;
And Cintra’s mountain greets
them on their way,
And Tagus dashing onward to the
deep,
His fabled golden tribute bent to
pay;
And soon on board the Lusian pilots
leap,
And steer ’twixt fertile shores where yet few
rustics reap.
Oh, Christ! it is a goodly sight
to see
What Heaven hath done for this delicious
land!
What fruits of fragrance blush on
every tree!
What goodly prospects o’er
the hills expand!
But man would mar them with an impious
hand:
And when the Almighty lifts his
fiercest scourge
’Gainst those who most transgress
his high command,
With treble vengeance will his hot
shafts urge
Gaul’s locust host, and earth from fellest foemen
purge.
What beauties doth Lisboa first
unfold!
Her image floating on that noble
tide,
Which poets vainly pave with sands
of gold,
But now whereon a thousand keels
did ride
Of mighty strength, since Albion
was allied,
And to the Lusians did her aid afford
A nation swoll’n with ignorance
and pride,
Who lick, yet loathe, the hand that
waves the sword.
To save them from the wrath of Gaul’s unsparing
lord.
But whoso entereth within this town,
That, sheening far, celestial seems
to be,
Disconsolate will wander up and
down,
Mid many things unsightly to strange
e’e;
For hut and palace show like filthily;
The dingy denizens are reared in
dirt;
No personage of high or mean degree
Doth care for cleanness of surtout
or shirt,
Though shent with Egypt’s plague, unkempt, unwashed,
unhurt.
Poor, paltry slaves! yet born midst
noblest scenes —
Why, Nature, waste thy wonders on
such men?
Lo! Cintra’s glorious
Eden intervenes
In variegated maze of mount and
glen.
Ah me! what hand can pencil guide,
or pen,
To follow half on which the eye
dilates
Through views more dazzling unto
mortal ken
Than those whereof such things the
bard relates,
Who to the awe-struck world unlocked Elysium’s
gates?
The horrid crags, by toppling convent
crowned,
The cork-trees hoar that clothe
the shaggy steep,
The mountain moss by scorching skies
imbrowned,
The sunken glen, whose sunless shrubs
must weep,
The tender azure of the unruffled
deep,
The orange tints that gild the greenest
bough,
The torrents that from cliff to
valley leap,
The vine on high, the willow branch
below,
Mixed in one mighty scene, with varied beauty glow.
Then slowly climb the many-winding
way,
And frequent turn to linger as you
go,
From loftier rocks new loveliness
survey,
And rest ye at ‘Our Lady’s
House of Woe;’
Where frugal monks their little
relics show,
And sundry legends to the stranger
tell:
Here impious men have punished been;
and lo,
Deep in yon cave Honorius long did
dwell,
In hope to merit Heaven by making earth a Hell.
And here and there, as up the crags
you spring,
Mark many rude-carved crosses near
the path;
Yet deem not these devotion’s
offering —
These are memorials frail of murderous
wrath;
For wheresoe’er the shrieking
victim hath
Poured forth his blood beneath the
assassin’s knife,
Some hand erects a cross of mouldering
lath;
And grove and glen with thousand
such are rife
Throughout this purple land, where law secures not
life!
On sloping mounds, or in the vale
beneath,
Are domes where whilom kings did
make repair;
But now the wild flowers round them
only breathe:
Yet ruined splendour still is lingering
there.
And yonder towers the prince’s
palace fair:
There thou, too, Vathek! England’s
wealthiest son,
Once formed thy Paradise, as not
aware
When wanton Wealth her mightiest
deeds hath done,
Meek Peace voluptuous lures was ever wont to shun.
Here didst thou dwell, here schemes
of pleasure plan.
Beneath yon mountain’s ever
beauteous brow;
But now, as if a thing unblest by
man,
Thy fairy dwelling is as lone as
thou!
Here giant weeds a passage scarce
allow
To halls deserted, portals gaping
wide;
Fresh lessons to the thinking bosom,
how
Vain are the pleasaunces on earth
supplied;
Swept into wrecks anon by Time’s ungentle tide.
Behold the hall where chiefs were
late convened!
Oh! dome displeasing unto British
eye!
With diadem hight foolscap, lo!
a fiend,
A little fiend that scoffs incessantly,
There sits in parchment robe arrayed,
and by
His side is hung a seal and sable
scroll,
Where blazoned glare names known
to chivalry,
And sundry signatures adorn the
roll,
Whereat the urchin points, and laughs with all his
soul.
Convention is the dwarfish demon
styled
That foiled the knights in Marialva’s
dome:
Of brains (if brains they had) he
them beguiled,
And turned a nation’s shallow
joy to gloom.
Here Folly dashed to earth the victor’s
And ever since that martial synod
met,
Britannia sickens, Cintra, at thy
name;
And folks in office at the mention
fret,
And fain would blush, if blush they
could, for shame.
How will posterity the deed proclaim!
Will not our own and fellow-nations
sneer,
To view these champions cheated
of their fame,
By foes in fight o’erthrown,
yet victors here,
Where Scorn her finger points through many a coming
year?
So deemed the Childe, as o’er
the mountains he
Did take his way in solitary guise:
Sweet was the scene, yet soon he
thought to flee,
More restless than the swallow in
the skies:
Though here awhile he learned to
moralise,
For Meditation fixed at times on
him,
And conscious Reason whispered to
despise
His early youth misspent in maddest
whim;
But as he gazed on Truth, his aching eyes grew dim.
To horse! to horse! he quits, for
ever quits
A scene of peace, though soothing
to his soul:
Again he rouses from his moping
fits,
But seeks not now the harlot and
the bowl.
Onward he flies, nor fixed as yet
the goal
Where he shall rest him on his pilgrimage;
And o’er him many changing
scenes must roll,
Ere toil his thirst for travel can
assuage,
Or he shall calm his breast, or learn experience sage.
Yet Mafra shall one moment claim
delay,
Where dwelt of yore the Lusians’
luckless queen;
And church and court did mingle
their array,
And mass and revel were alternate
seen;
Lordlings and freres—ill-sorted
fry, I ween!
But here the Babylonian whore had
built
A dome, where flaunts she in such
glorious sheen,
That men forget the blood which
she hath spilt,
And bow the knee to Pomp that loves to garnish guilt.
O’er vales that teem with
fruits, romantic hills,
(Oh that such hills upheld a free-born
race!)
Whereon to gaze the eye with joyaunce
fills,
Childe Harold wends through many
a pleasant place.
Though sluggards deem it but a foolish
chase,
And marvel men should quit their
easy chair,
The toilsome way, and long, long
league to trace.
Oh, there is sweetness in the mountain
air
And life, that bloated Ease can never hope to share.
More bleak to view the hills at
length recede,
And, less luxuriant, smoother vales
extend:
Immense horizon-bounded plains succeed!
Far as the eye discerns, withouten
end,
Spain’s realms appear, whereon
her shepherds tend
Flocks, whose rich fleece right
well the trader knows —
Now must the pastor’s arm
his lambs defend:
For Spain is compassed by unyielding
foes,
And all must shield their all, or share Subjection’s
woes.
Where Lusitania and her Sister meet,
Deem ye what bounds the rival realms
divide?
Or e’er the jealous queens
of nations greet,
Doth Tayo interpose his mighty tide?
Or dark sierras rise in craggy pride?
Or fence of art, like China’s
vasty wall? —
Ne barrier wall, ne river deep and
wide,
Ne horrid crags, nor mountains dark
and tall
Rise like the rocks that part Hispania’s land
from Gaul
But these between a silver streamlet
glides,
And scarce a name distinguisheth
the brook,
Though rival kingdoms press its
verdant sides.
Here leans the idle shepherd on
his crook,
And vacant on the rippling waves
doth look,
That peaceful still ’twixt
bitterest foemen flow:
For proud each peasant as the noblest
duke:
Well doth the Spanish hind the difference
know
’Twixt him and Lusian slave, the lowest of the
low.
But ere the mingling bounds have
far been passed,
Dark Guadiana rolls his power along
In sullen billows, murmuring and
vast,
So noted ancient roundelays among.
Whilome upon his banks did legions
throng
Of Moor and Knight, in mailed splendour
drest;
Here ceased the swift their race,
here sunk the strong;
The Paynim turban and the Christian
crest
Mixed on the bleeding stream, by floating hosts oppressed.
Oh, lovely Spain! renowned, romantic
land!
Where is that standard which Pelagio
bore,
When Cava’s traitor-sire first
called the band
That dyed thy mountain-streams with
Gothic gore?
Where are those bloody banners which
of yore
Waved o’er thy sons, victorious
to the gale,
And drove at last the spoilers to
their shore?
Red gleamed the cross, and waned
the crescent pale,
While Afric’s echoes thrilled with Moorish matrons’
wail.
Teems not each ditty with the glorious
tale?
Ah! such, alas, the hero’s
amplest fate!
When granite moulders and when records
fail,
A peasant’s plaint prolongs
his dubious date.
Pride! bend thine eye from heaven
to thine estate,
See how the mighty shrink into a
song!
Can volume, pillar, pile, preserve
thee great?
Or must thou trust Tradition’s
simple tongue,
When Flattery sleeps with thee, and History does thee
wrong?
Awake, ye sons of Spain! awake!
advance
Lo! Chivalry, your ancient
goddess, cries,
But wields not, as of old, her thirsty
lance,
Nor shakes her crimson plumage in
the skies:
Now on the smoke of blazing bolts
she flies,
And speaks in thunder through yon
engine’s roar!
In every peal she calls—’Awake!
arise!’
Say, is her voice more feeble than
of yore,
When her war-song was heard on Andalusia’s shore?
Hark! heard you not those hoofs
of dreadful note?
Sounds not the clang of conflict
on the heath?
Saw ye not whom the reeking sabre
smote;
Nor saved your brethren ere they
sank beneath
Tyrants and tyrants’ slaves?—the
fires of death,
The bale-fires flash on high:
—from rock to rock
Each volley tells that thousands
cease to breathe:
Death rides upon the sulphury Siroc,
Red Battle stamps his foot, and nations feel the shock.
Lo! where the Giant on the mountain
stands,
His blood-red tresses deepening
in the sun,
With death-shot glowing in his fiery
hands,
And eye that scorcheth all it glares
upon;
Restless it rolls, now fixed, and
now anon
Flashing afar,—and at
his iron feet
Destruction cowers, to mark what
deeds are done;
For on this morn three potent nations
meet,
To shed before his shrine the blood he deems most
sweet.
By Heaven! it is a splendid sight
to see
(For one who hath no friend, no
brother there)
Their rival scarfs of mixed embroidery,
Their various arms that glitter
in the air!
What gallant war-hounds rouse them
from their lair,
And gnash their fangs, loud yelling
for the prey!
All join the chase, but few the
triumph share:
The Grave shall bear the chiefest
prize away,
And Havoc scarce for joy can cumber their array.
Three hosts combine to offer sacrifice;
Three tongues prefer strange orisons
on high;
Three gaudy standards flout the
pale blue skies.
The shouts are France, Spain, Albion,
Victory!
The foe, the victim, and the fond
ally
That fights for all, but ever fights
in vain,
Are met—as if at home
they could not die —
To feed the crow on Talavera’s
plain,
And fertilise the field that each pretends to gain.
There shall they rot—Ambition’s
honoured fools!
Yes, Honour decks the turf that
wraps their clay!
Vain Sophistry! in these behold
the tools,
The broken tools, that tyrants cast
away
By myriads, when they dare to pave
their way
With human hearts—to
what?—a dream alone.
Can despots compass aught that hails
their sway?
Or call with truth one span of earth
their own,
Save that wherein at last they crumble bone by bone?
O Albuera, glorious field of grief!
As o’er thy plain the Pilgrim
pricked his steed,
Who could foresee thee, in a space
so brief,
A scene where mingling foes should
boast and bleed.
Peace to the perished! may the warrior’s
meed
And tears of triumph their reward
prolong!
Till others fall where other chieftains
lead,
Thy name shall circle round the
gaping throng,
And shine in worthless lays, the theme of transient
song.
Enough of Battle’s minions!
let them play
Their game of lives, and barter
breath for fame:
Fame that will scarce reanimate
their clay,
Though thousands fall to deck some
single name.
In sooth, ’twere sad to thwart
their noble aim
Who strike, blest hirelings! for
their country’s good,
And die, that living might have
proved her shame;
Perished, perchance, in some domestic
feud,
Or in a narrower sphere wild Rapine’s path pursued.
Full swiftly Harold wends his lonely
way
Where proud Sevilla triumphs unsubdued:
Yet is she free—the spoiler’s
wished-for prey!
Soon, soon shall Conquest’s
fiery foot intrude,
Blackening her lovely domes with
traces rude.
Inevitable hour! ’Gainst
fate to strive
Where Desolation plants her famished
brood
Is vain, or Ilion, Tyre, might yet
survive,
And Virtue vanquish all, and Murder cease to thrive.
But all unconscious of the coming
doom,
The feast, the song, the revel here
abounds;
Strange modes of merriment the hours
consume,
Nor bleed these patriots with their
country’s wounds;
Nor here War’s clarion, but
Love’s rebeck sounds;
Here Folly still his votaries enthralls,
And young-eyed Lewdness walks her
midnight rounds:
Girt with the silent crimes of capitals,
Still to the last kind Vice clings to the tottering
walls.
Not so the rustic: with his
trembling mate
He lurks, nor casts his heavy eye
afar,
Lest he should view his vineyard
desolate,
Blasted below the dun hot breath
of war.
No more beneath soft Eve’s
consenting star
Fandango twirls his jocund castanet:
Ah, monarchs! could ye taste the
mirth ye mar,
Not in the toils of Glory would
ye fret;
The hoarse dull drum would sleep, and Man be happy
yet.
How carols now the lusty muleteer?
Of love, romance, devotion is his
lay,
As whilome he was wont the leagues
to cheer,
His quick bells wildly jingling
on the way?
No! as he speeds, he chants ‘Viva
el Rey!’
And checks his song to execrate
Godoy,
The royal wittol Charles, and curse
the day
When first Spain’s queen beheld
the black-eyed boy,
And gore-faced Treason sprung from her adulterate
joy.
On yon long level plain, at distance
crowned
With crags, whereon those Moorish
turrets rest,
Wide scattered hoof-marks dint the
wounded ground;
And, scathed by fire, the greensward’s
darkened vest
Tells that the foe was Andalusia’s
guest:
Here was the camp, the watch-flame,
and the host,
Here the brave peasant stormed the
dragon’s nest;
Still does he mark it with triumphant
boast,
And points to yonder cliffs, which oft were won and
lost.
And whomsoe’er along the path
you meet
Bears in his cap the badge of crimson
hue,
Which tells you whom to shun and
whom to greet:
Woe to the man that walks in public
view
Without of loyalty this token true:
Sharp is the knife, and sudden is
the stroke;
And sorely would the Gallic foemen
rue,
If subtle poniards, wrapt beneath
the cloak,
Could blunt the sabre’s edge, or clear the cannon’s
smoke.
At every turn Morena’s dusky
height
Sustains aloft the battery’s
iron load;
And, far as mortal eye can compass
sight,
The mountain-howitzer, the broken
road,
The bristling palisade, the fosse
o’erflowed,
The stationed bands, the never-vacant
watch,
The magazine in rocky durance stowed,
The holstered steed beneath the
shed of thatch,
The ball-piled pyramid, the ever-blazing match,
Portend the deeds to come:
—but he whose nod
Has tumbled feebler despots from
their sway,
A moment pauseth ere he lifts the
rod;
A little moment deigneth to delay:
Soon will his legions sweep through
these the way;
The West must own the Scourger of
the world.
Ah, Spain! how sad will be thy reckoning
day,
When soars Gaul’s Vulture,
with his wings unfurled,
And thou shalt view thy sons in crowds to Hades hurled.
And must they fall—the
young, the proud, the brave —
To swell one bloated chief’s
unwholesome reign?
No step between submission and a
grave?
The rise of rapine and the fall
of Spain?
And doth the Power that man adores
Is it for this the Spanish maid,
aroused,
Hangs on the willow her unstrung
guitar,
And, all unsexed, the anlace hath
espoused,
Sung the loud song, and dared the
deed of war?
And she, whom once the semblance
of a scar
Appalled, an owlet’s larum
chilled with dread,
Now views the column-scattering
bayonet jar,
The falchion flash, and o’er
the yet warm dead
Stalks with Minerva’s step where Mars might
quake to tread.
Ye who shall marvel when you hear
her tale,
Oh! had you known her in her softer
hour,
Marked her black eye that mocks
her coal-black veil,
Heard her light, lively tones in
lady’s bower,
Seen her long locks that foil the
painter’s power,
Her fairy form, with more than female
grace,
Scarce would you deem that Saragoza’s
tower
Beheld her smile in Danger’s
Gorgon face,
Thin the closed ranks, and lead in Glory’s fearful
chase.
Her lover sinks—she sheds
no ill-timed tear;
Her chief is slain—she
fills his fatal post;
Her fellows flee—she
checks their base career;
The foe retires—she heads
the sallying host:
Who can appease like her a lover’s
ghost?
Who can avenge so well a leader’s
fall?
What maid retrieve when man’s
flushed hope is lost?
Who hang so fiercely on the flying
Gaul,
Foiled by a woman’s hand, before a battered
wall?
Yet are Spain’s maids no race
of Amazons,
But formed for all the witching
arts of love:
Though thus in arms they emulate
her sons,
And in the horrid phalanx dare to
move,
’Tis but the tender fierceness
of the dove,
Pecking the hand that hovers o’er
her mate:
In softness as in firmness far above
Remoter females, famed for sickening
prate;
Her mind is nobler sure, her charms perchance as great.
The seal Love’s dimpling finger
hath impressed
Denotes how soft that chin which
bears his touch:
Her lips, whose kisses pout to leave
their nest,
Bid man be valiant ere he merit
such:
Her glance, how wildly beautiful!
how much
Hath Phoebus wooed in vain to spoil
her cheek
Which glows yet smoother from his
amorous clutch!
Who round the North for paler dames
would seek?
How poor their forms appear? how languid, wan, and
weak!
Match me, ye climes! which poets
love to laud;
Match me, ye harems! of the land
where now
I strike my strain, far distant,
to applaud
Beauties that even a cynic must
avow!
Match me those houris, whom ye scarce
allow
To taste the gale lest Love should
ride the wind,
With Spain’s dark-glancing
daughters—deign to know,
There your wise Prophet’s
paradise we find,
His black-eyed maids of Heaven, angelically kind.
O thou, Parnassus! whom I now survey,
Not in the frenzy of a dreamer’s
eye,
Not in the fabled landscape of a
lay,
But soaring snow-clad through thy
native sky,
In the wild pomp of mountain majesty!
What marvel if I thus essay to sing?
The humblest of thy pilgrims passing
by
Would gladly woo thine echoes with
his string,
Though from thy heights no more one muse will wave
her wing.
Oft have I dreamed of thee! whose
glorious name
Who knows not, knows not man’s
divinest lore:
And now I view thee, ’tis,
alas, with shame
That I in feeblest accents must
adore.
When I recount thy worshippers of
yore
I tremble, and can only bend the
knee;
Nor raise my voice, nor vainly dare
to soar,
But gaze beneath thy cloudy canopy
In silent joy to think at last I look on thee!
Happier in this than mightiest bards
have been,
Whose fate to distant homes confined
their lot,
Shall I unmoved behold the hallowed
scene,
Which others rave of, though they
know it not?
Though here no more Apollo haunts
his grot,
And thou, the Muses’ seat,
art now their grave,
Some gentle spirit still pervades
the spot,
Sighs in the gale, keeps silence
in the cave,
And glides with glassy foot o’er yon melodious
wave.
Of thee hereafter.—Even
amidst my strain
I turned aside to pay my homage
here;
Forgot the land, the sons, the maids
of Spain;
Her fate, to every free-born bosom
dear;
And hailed thee, not perchance without
a tear.
Now to my theme—but from
thy holy haunt
Let me some remnant, some memorial
bear;
Yield me one leaf of Daphne’s
deathless plant,
Nor let thy votary’s hope be deemed an idle
vaunt.
But ne’er didst thou, fair
mount, when Greece was young,
See round thy giant base a brighter
choir;
Nor e’er did Delphi, when
her priestess sung
The Pythian hymn with more than
mortal fire,
Behold a train more fitting to inspire
The song of love than Andalusia’s
maids,
Nurst in the glowing lap of soft
desire:
Ah! that to these were given such
peaceful shades
As Greece can still bestow, though Glory fly her glades.
Fair is proud Seville; let her country
boast
Her strength, her wealth, her site
of ancient days,
But Cadiz, rising on the distant
coast,
Calls forth a sweeter, though ignoble
praise.
Ah, Vice! how soft are thy voluptuous
ways!
While boyish blood is mantling,
who can ’scape
The fascination of thy magic gaze?
A cherub-hydra round us dost thou
gape,
And mould to every taste thy dear delusive shape.
When Paphos fell by Time—accursed
Time!
The Queen who conquers all must
yield to thee —
The Pleasures fled, but sought as
warm a clime;
And Venus, constant to her native
sea,
To nought else constant, hither
deigned to flee,
And fixed her shrine within these
walls of white;
Though not to one dome circumscribeth
she
Her worship, but, devoted to her
rite,
A thousand altars rise, for ever blazing bright.
From morn till night, from night
till startled morn
Peeps blushing on the revel’s
laughing crew,
The song is heard, the rosy garland
worn;
Devices quaint, and frolics ever
new,
Tread on each other’s kibes.
A long adieu
He bids to sober joy that here sojourns:
Nought interrupts the riot, though
in lieu
Of true devotion monkish incense
burns,
And love and prayer unite, or rule the hour by turns.
The sabbath comes, a day of blessed
rest;
What hallows it upon this Christian
shore?
Lo! it is sacred to a solemn feast:
Hark! heard you not the forest monarch’s
roar?
Crashing the lance, he snuffs the
spouting gore
Of man and steed, o’erthrown
beneath his horn:
The thronged arena shakes with shouts
for more;
Yells the mad crowd o’er entrails
freshly torn,
Nor shrinks the female eye, nor e’en affects
to mourn.
The seventh day this; the jubilee
of man.
London! right well thou know’st
the day of prayer:
Then thy spruce citizen, washed
artizan,
And smug apprentice gulp their weekly
air:
Thy coach of hackney, whiskey, one-horse
chair,
And humblest gig, through sundry
suburbs whirl;
To Hampstead, Brentford, Harrow,
make repair;
Till the tired jade the wheel forgets
to hurl,
Provoking envious gibe from each pedestrian churl.
Some o’er thy Thamis row the
ribboned fair,
Others along the safer turnpike
fly;
Some Richmond Hill ascend, some
scud to Ware,
And many to the steep of Highgate
hie.
Ask ye, Boeotian shades, the reason
why?
’Tis to the worship of the
solemn Horn,
Grasped in the holy hand of Mystery,
In whose dread name both men and
maids are sworn,
And consecrate the oath with draught and dance till
morn.
All have their fooleries; not alike
are thine,
Fair Cadiz, rising o’er the
dark blue sea!
Soon as the matin bell proclaimeth
nine,
Thy saint adorers count the rosary:
Much is the Virgin teased to shrive
them free
(Well do I ween the only virgin
there)
From crimes as numerous as her beadsmen
be;
Then to the crowded circus forth
they fare:
Young, old, high, low, at once the same diversion
share.
The lists are oped, the spacious
area cleared,
Thousands on thousands piled are
seated round;
Long ere the first loud trumpet’s
note is heard,
No vacant space for lated wight
is found:
Here dons, grandees, but chiefly
dames abound,
Skilled in the ogle of a roguish
eye,
Yet ever well inclined to heal the
wound;
None through their cold disdain
are doomed to die,
As moon-struck bards complain, by Love’s sad
archery.
Hushed is the din of tongues—on
gallant steeds,
With milk-white crest, gold spur,
and light-poised lance,
Four cavaliers prepare for venturous
deeds,
And lowly bending to the lists advance;
Rich are their scarfs, their chargers
featly prance:
If in the dangerous game they shine
to-day,
The crowd’s loud shout, and
ladies’ lovely glance,
Best prize of better acts, they
bear away,
And all that kings or chiefs e’er gain their
toils repay.
In costly sheen and gaudy cloak
arrayed,
But all afoot, the light-limbed
matadore
Stands in the centre, eager to invade
The lord of lowing herds; but not
before
The ground, with cautious tread,
is traversed o’er,
Lest aught unseen should lurk to
thwart his speed:
His arms a dart, he fights aloof,
nor more
Can man achieve without the friendly
steed —
Alas! too oft condemned for him to bear and bleed.
Thrice sounds the clarion; lo! the
signal falls,
The den expands, and expectation
mute
Gapes round the silent circle’s
peopled walls.
Bounds with one lashing spring the
mighty brute,
And wildly staring, spurns, with
sounding foot,
The sand, nor blindly rushes on
his foe:
Here, there, he points his threatening
front, to suit
His first attack, wide waving to
and fro
His angry tail; red rolls his eye’s dilated
glow.
Sudden he stops; his eye is fixed:
away,
Away, thou heedless boy! prepare
the spear;
Now is thy time to perish, or display
The skill that yet may check his
mad career.
With well-timed croupe the nimble
coursers veer;
On foams the bull, but not unscathed
he goes;
Streams from his flank the crimson
torrent clear:
He flies, he wheels, distracted
with his throes:
Dart follows dart; lance, lance; loud bellowings speak
his woes.
Again he comes; nor dart nor lance
avail,
Nor the wild plunging of the tortured
horse;
Though man and man’s avenging
arms assail,
Vain are his weapons, vainer is
his force.
One gallant steed is stretched a
mangled corse;
Another, hideous sight! unseamed
appears,
His gory chest unveils life’s
panting source;
Though death-struck, still his feeble
frame he rears;
Staggering, but stemming all, his lord unharmed he
bears.
Foiled, bleeding, breathless, furious
to the last,
Full in the centre stands the bull
at bay,
Mid wounds, and clinging darts,
and lances brast,
And foes disabled in the brutal
fray:
And now the matadores around him
play,
Shake the red cloak, and poise the
ready brand:
Once more through all he bursts
his thundering way —
Vain rage! the mantle quits the
conynge hand,
Wraps his fierce eye—’tis past—he
sinks upon the sand.
Where his vast neck just mingles
with the spine,
Sheathed in his form the deadly
weapon lies.
He stops—he starts—disdaining
to decline:
Slowly he falls, amidst triumphant
cries,
Without a groan, without a struggle
dies.
The decorated car appears on high:
The corse is piled—sweet
sight for vulgar eyes;
Four steeds that spurn the rein,
as swift as shy,
Hurl the dark bull along, scarce seen in dashing by.
Such the ungentle sport that oft
invites
The Spanish maid, and cheers the
Spanish swain:
Nurtured in blood betimes, his heart
delights
In vengeance, gloating on another’s
pain.
What private feuds the troubled
village stain!
Though now one phalanxed host should
meet the foe,
Enough, alas, in humble homes remain,
To meditate ’gainst friends
the secret blow,
For some slight cause of wrath, whence life’s
warm stream must flow.
But Jealousy has fled: his
bars, his bolts,
His withered sentinel, duenna sage!
And all whereat the generous soul
revolts,
Which the stern dotard deemed he
could encage,
Have passed to darkness with the
vanished age.
Who late so free as Spanish girls
were seen
(Ere War uprose in his volcanic
rage),
With braided tresses bounding o’er
the green,
While on the gay dance shone Night’s lover-loving
Queen?
Oh! many a time and oft had Harold
loved,
Or dreamed he loved, since rapture
is a dream;
But now his wayward bosom was unmoved,
For not yet had he drunk of Lethe’s
stream:
And lately had he learned with truth
to deem
Love has no gift so grateful as
his wings:
How fair, how young, how soft soe’er
he seem,
Full from the fount of joy’s
delicious springs
Some bitter o’er the flowers its bubbling venom
flings.
Yet to the beauteous form he was
not blind,
Though now it moved him as it moves
the wise;
Not that Philosophy on such a mind
E’er deigned to bend her chastely-awful
eyes:
But Passion raves itself to rest,
or flies;
And Vice, that digs her own voluptuous
tomb,
Had buried long his hopes, no more
to rise:
Pleasure’s palled victim!
life-abhorring gloom
Wrote on his faded brow curst Cain’s unresting
doom.
Still he beheld, nor mingled with
the throng;
But viewed them not with misanthropic
hate;
Fain would he now have joined the
dance, the song,
But who may smile that sinks beneath
his fate?
Nought that he saw his sadness could
abate:
Yet once he struggled ’gainst
the demon’s sway,
And as in Beauty’s bower he
pensive sate,
Poured forth this unpremeditated
lay,
To charms as fair as those that soothed his happier
day.
TO INEZ.
Nay, smile not at my sullen brow,
Alas! I cannot smile again:
Yet Heaven avert that ever thou
Shouldst weep, and haply weep in
vain.
And dost thou ask what secret woe
I bear, corroding joy and youth?
And wilt thou vainly seek to know
A pang even thou must fail to soothe?
It is not love, it is not hate,
Nor low Ambition’s honours
lost,
That bids me loathe my present state,
And fly from all I prized the most:
It is that weariness which springs
From all I meet, or hear, or see:
To me no pleasure Beauty brings;
Thine eyes have scarce a charm for
me.
It is that settled, ceaseless gloom
The fabled Hebrew wanderer bore,
That will not look beyond the tomb,
But cannot hope for rest before.
What exile from himself can flee?
To zones, though more and more remote,
Still, still pursues, where’er I be,
The blight of life—the
demon Thought.
Yet others rapt in pleasure seem,
And taste of all that I forsake:
Oh! may they still of transport dream,
And ne’er, at least like me,
awake!
Through many a clime ’tis mine to go,
With many a retrospection curst;
And all my solace is to know,
Whate’er betides, I’ve
known the worst.
What is that worst? Nay, do not ask —
In pity from the search forbear:
Smile on—nor venture to unmask
Man’s heart, and view the
hell that’s there.
Adieu, fair Cadiz! yea, a long adieu!
Who may forget how well thy walls
have stood?
When all were changing, thou alone
wert true,
First to be free, and last to be
subdued.
And if amidst a scene, a shock so
rude,
Some native blood was seen thy streets
to dye,
A traitor only fell beneath the
feud:
Here all were noble, save nobility;
None hugged a conqueror’s chain save fallen
Chivalry!
Such be the sons of Spain, and strange
her fate!
They fight for freedom, who were
never free;
A kingless people for a nerveless
state,
Her vassals combat when their chieftains
flee,
True to the veriest slaves of Treachery;
Fond of a land which gave them nought
but life,
Pride points the path that leads
to liberty;
Back to the struggle, baffled in
the strife,
War, war is still the cry, ‘War even to the
knife!’
Ye, who would more of Spain and
Spaniards know,
Go, read whate’er is writ
of bloodiest strife:
Whate’er keen Vengeance urged
on foreign foe
Can act, is acting there against
man’s life:
From flashing scimitar to secret
knife,
War mouldeth there each weapon to
his need —
So may he guard the sister and the
wife,
So may he make each curst oppressor
bleed,
So may such foes deserve the most remorseless deed!
Flows there a tear of pity for the
dead?
Look o’er the ravage of the
reeking plain:
Look on the hands with female slaughter
red;
Then to the dogs resign the unburied
slain,
Then to the vulture let each corse
remain;
Albeit unworthy of the prey-bird’s
maw,
Let their bleached bones, and blood’s
unbleaching stain,
Long mark the battle-field with
hideous awe:
Thus only may our sons conceive the scenes we saw!
Nor yet, alas, the dreadful work
is done;
Fresh legions pour adown the Pyrenees:
It deepens still, the work is scarce
begun,
Nor mortal eye the distant end foresees.
Fall’n nations gaze on Spain:
if freed, she frees
More than her fell Pizarros once
enchained.
Strange retribution! now Columbia’s
ease
Repairs the wrongs that Quito’s
sons sustained,
While o’er the parent clime prowls Murder unrestrained.
Not all the blood at Talavera shed,
Not all the marvels of Barossa’s
fight,
Not Albuera lavish of the dead,
Have won for Spain her well-asserted
right.
When shall her Olive-Branch be free
from blight?
When shall she breathe her from
the blushing toil?
How many a doubtful day shall sink
in night,
Ere the Frank robber turn him from
his spoil,
And Freedom’s stranger-tree grow native of the
soil?
And thou, my friend! since unavailing
woe
Bursts from my heart, and mingles
with the strain —
Had the sword laid thee with the
mighty low,
Pride might forbid e’en Friendship
to complain:
But thus unlaurelled to descend
in vain,
By all forgotten, save the lonely
breast,
And mix unbleeding with the boasted
slain,
While glory crowns so many a meaner
crest!
What hadst thou done, to sink so peacefully to rest?
Oh, known the earliest, and esteemed
the most!
Dear to a heart where nought was
left so dear!
Though to my hopeless days for ever
lost,
In dreams deny me not to see thee
here!
And Morn in secret shall renew the
tear
Of Consciousness awaking to her
woes,
And Fancy hover o’er thy bloodless
bier,
Till my frail frame return to whence
it rose,
And mourned and mourner lie united in repose.
Here is one fytte of Harold’s
pilgrimage.
Ye who of him may further seek to
know,
Shall find some tidings in a future
page,
If he that rhymeth now may scribble
moe.
Is this too much? Stern critic,
say not so:
Patience! and ye shall hear what
he beheld
In other lands, where he was doomed
to go:
Lands that contain the monuments
of eld,
Ere Greece and Grecian arts by barbarous hands were
quelled.
CANTO THE SECOND.
Come, blue-eyed maid of heaven!—but
thou, alas,
Didst never yet one mortal song
inspire —
Goddess of Wisdom! here thy temple
was,
And is, despite of war and wasting
fire,
And years, that bade thy worship
to expire:
But worse than steel, and flame,
and ages slow,
Is the drear sceptre and dominion
dire
Of men who never felt the sacred
glow
That thoughts of thee and thine on polished breasts
bestow.
Ancient of days! august Athena!
where,
Where are thy men of might, thy
grand in soul?
Gone—glimmering through
the dream of things that were:
First in the race that led to Glory’s
goal,
They won, and passed away—is
Son of the morning, rise! approach
you here!
Come—but molest not yon
defenceless urn!
Look on this spot—a nation’s
sepulchre!
Abode of gods, whose shrines no
longer burn.
E’en gods must yield—religions
take their turn:
’Twas Jove’s—’tis
Mahomet’s; and other creeds
Will rise with other years, till
man shall learn
Vainly his incense soars, his victim
bleeds;
Poor child of Doubt and Death, whose hope is built
on reeds.
Bound to the earth, he lifts his
eyes to heaven —
Is’t not enough, unhappy thing,
to know
Thou art? Is this a boon so
kindly given,
That being, thou wouldst be again,
and go,
Thou know’st not, reck’st
not to what region, so
On earth no more, but mingled with
the skies!
Still wilt thou dream on future
joy and woe?
Regard and weigh yon dust before
it flies:
That little urn saith more than thousand homilies.
Or burst the vanished hero’s
lofty mound;
Far on the solitary shore he sleeps;
He fell, and falling nations mourned
around;
But now not one of saddening thousands
weeps,
Nor warlike worshipper his vigil
keeps
Where demi-gods appeared, as records
tell.
Remove yon skull from out the scattered
heaps:
Is that a temple where a God may
dwell?
Why, e’en the worm at last disdains her shattered
cell!
Look on its broken arch, its ruined
wall,
Its chambers desolate, and portals
foul:
Yes, this was once Ambition’s
airy hall,
The dome of Thought, the Palace
of the Soul.
Behold through each lack-lustre,
eyeless hole,
The gay recess of Wisdom and of
Wit,
And Passion’s host, that never
brooked control:
Can all saint, sage, or sophist
ever writ,
People this lonely tower, this tenement refit?
Well didst thou speak, Athena’s
wisest son!
‘All that we know is, nothing
can be known.’
Why should we shrink from what we
cannot shun?
Each hath its pang, but feeble sufferers
groan
With brain-born dreams of evil all
their own.
Pursue what chance or fate proclaimeth
best;
Peace waits us on the shores of
Acheron:
There no forced banquet claims the
sated guest,
But Silence spreads the couch of ever welcome rest.
Yet if, as holiest men have deemed,
there be
A land of souls beyond that sable
shore,
To shame the doctrine of the Sadducee
And sophists, madly vain of dubious
lore;
How sweet it were in concert to
adore
With those who made our mortal labours
light!
To hear each voice we feared to
hear no more!
Behold each mighty shade revealed
to sight,
The Bactrian, Samian sage, and all who taught the
right!
There, thou!—whose love
and life together fled,
Have left me here to love and live
in vain —
Twined with my heart, and can I
deem thee dead,
When busy memory flashes on my brain?
Well—I will dream that
we may meet again,
And woo the vision to my vacant
breast:
If aught of young Remembrance then
remain,
Be as it may Futurity’s behest,
For me ’twere bliss enough to know thy spirit
blest!
Here let me sit upon this mossy
stone,
The marble column’s yet unshaken
base!
Here, son of Saturn, was thy favourite
throne!
Mightiest of many such! Hence
let me trace
The latent grandeur of thy dwelling-place.
It may not be: nor even can
Fancy’s eye
Restore what time hath laboured
to deface.
Yet these proud pillars claim no
passing sigh;
Unmoved the Moslem sits, the light Greek carols by.
But who, of all the plunderers of
yon fane
On high, where Pallas lingered,
loth to flee
The latest relic of her ancient
reign —
The last, the worst, dull spoiler,
who was he?
Blush, Caledonia! such thy son could
be!
England! I joy no child he
was of thine:
Thy free-born men should spare what
once was free;
Yet they could violate each saddening
shrine,
And bear these altars o’er the long reluctant
brine.
But most the modern Pict’s
ignoble boast,
To rive what Goth, and Turk, and
Time hath spared:
Cold as the crags upon his native
coast,
His mind as barren and his heart
as hard,
Is he whose head conceived, whose
hand prepared,
Aught to displace Athena’s
poor remains:
Her sons too weak the sacred shrine
to guard,
Yet felt some portion of their mother’s
pains,
And never knew, till then, the weight of Despot’s
chains.
What! shall it e’er be said
by British tongue
Albion was happy in Athena’s
tears?
Though in thy name the slaves her
bosom wrung,
Tell not the deed to blushing Europe’s
ears;
The ocean queen, the free Britannia,
bears
The last poor plunder from a bleeding
land:
Yes, she, whose generous aid her
name endears,
Tore down those remnants with a
harpy’s hand.
Which envious eld forbore, and tyrants left to stand.
Where was thine aegis, Pallas, that
appalled
Stern Alaric and Havoc on their
way?
Where Peleus’ son? whom Hell
in vain enthralled,
His shade from Hades upon that dread
day
Bursting to light in terrible array!
What! could not Pluto spare the
chief once more,
To scare a second robber from his
prey?
Idly he wandered on the Stygian
shore,
Nor now preserved the walls he loved to shield before.
Cold is the heart, fair Greece,
that looks on thee,
Nor feels as lovers o’er the
dust they loved;
Dull is the eye that will not weep
to see
Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering
shrines removed
By British hands, which it had best
behoved
To guard those relics ne’er
to be restored.
Curst be the hour when from their
isle they roved,
And once again thy hapless bosom
gored,
And snatched thy shrinking gods to northern climes
abhorred!
But where is Harold? shall I then
forget
To urge the gloomy wanderer o’er
the wave?
Little recked he of all that men
regret;
No loved one now in feigned lament
could rave;
No friend the parting hand extended
gave,
Ere the cold stranger passed to
other climes.
Hard is his heart whom charms may
not enslave;
But Harold felt not as in other
times,
And left without a sigh the land of war and crimes.
He that has sailed upon the dark
blue sea,
Has viewed at times, I ween, a full
fair sight;
When the fresh breeze is fair as
breeze may be,
The white sails set, the gallant
frigate tight,
Masts, spires, and strand retiring
to the right,
The glorious main expanding o’er
the bow,
The convoy spread like wild swans
in their flight,
The dullest sailer wearing bravely
now,
So gaily curl the waves before each dashing prow.
And oh, the little warlike world
within!
The well-reeved guns, the netted
canopy,
The hoarse command, the busy humming
din,
When, at a word, the tops are manned
on high:
Hark to the boatswain’s call,
the cheering cry,
While through the seaman’s
hand the tackle glides
Or schoolboy midshipman that, standing
by,
Strains his shrill pipe, as good
or ill betides,
And well the docile crew that skilful urchin guides.
White is the glassy deck, without
a stain,
Where on the watch the staid lieutenant
walks:
Look on that part which sacred doth
remain
For the lone chieftain, who majestic
stalks,
Blow, swiftly blow, thou keel-compelling
gale,
Till the broad sun withdraws his
lessening ray;
Then must the pennant-bearer slacken
sail,
That lagging barks may make their
lazy way.
Ah! grievance sore, and listless
dull delay,
To waste on sluggish hulks the sweetest
breeze!
What leagues are lost before the
dawn of day,
Thus loitering pensive on the willing
seas,
The flapping sails hauled down to halt for logs like
these!
The moon is up; by Heaven, a lovely
eve!
Long streams of light o’er
dancing waves expand!
Now lads on shore may sigh, and
maids believe:
Such be our fate when we return
to land!
Meantime some rude Arion’s
restless hand
Wakes the brisk harmony that sailors
love:
A circle there of merry listeners
stand,
Or to some well-known measure featly
move,
Thoughtless, as if on shore they still were free to
rove.
Through Calpe’s straits survey
the steepy shore;
Europe and Afric, on each other
gaze!
Lands of the dark-eyed maid and
dusky Moor,
Alike beheld beneath pale Hecate’s
blaze:
How softly on the Spanish shore
she plays,
Disclosing rock, and slope, and
forest brown,
Distinct, though darkening with
her waning phase:
But Mauritania’s giant-shadows
frown,
From mountain-cliff to coast descending sombre down.
’Tis night, when Meditation
bids us feel
We once have loved, though love
is at an end:
The heart, lone mourner of its baffled
zeal,
Though friendless now, will dream
it had a friend.
Who with the weight of years would
wish to bend,
When Youth itself survives young
Love and Joy?
Alas! when mingling souls forget
to blend,
Death hath but little left him to
destroy!
Ah, happy years! once more who would not be a boy?
Thus bending o’er the vessel’s
laving side,
To gaze on Dian’s wave-reflected
sphere,
The soul forgets her schemes of
Hope and Pride,
And flies unconscious o’er
each backward year.
None are so desolate but something
dear,
Dearer than self, possesses or possessed
A thought, and claims the homage
of a tear;
A flashing pang! of which the weary
breast
Would still, albeit in vain, the heavy heart divest.
To sit on rocks, to muse o’er
flood and fell,
To slowly trace the forest’s
shady scene,
Where things that own not man’s
dominion dwell,
And mortal foot hath ne’er
or rarely been;
To climb the trackless mountain
all unseen,
With the wild flock that never needs
a fold;
Alone o’er steeps and foaming
falls to lean:
This is not solitude; ’tis
but to hold
Converse with Nature’s charms, and view her
stores unrolled.
But midst the crowd, the hum, the
shock of men,
To hear, to see, to feel, and to
possess,
And roam along, the world’s
tired denizen,
With none who bless us, none whom
we can bless;
Minions of splendour shrinking from
distress!
None that, with kindred consciousness
endued,
If we were not, would seem to smile
the less
Of all that flattered, followed,
sought, and sued:
This is to be alone; this, this is solitude!
More blest the life of godly eremite,
Such as on lonely Athos may be seen,
Watching at eve upon the giant height,
Which looks o’er waves so
blue, skies so serene,
That he who there at such an hour
hath been,
Will wistful linger on that hallowed
spot;
Then slowly tear him from the witching
scene,
Sigh forth one wish that such had
been his lot,
Then turn to hate a world he had almost forgot.
Pass we the long, unvarying course,
the track
Oft trod, that never leaves a trace
behind;
Pass we the calm, the gale, the
change, the tack,
And each well-known caprice of wave
and wind;
Pass we the joys and sorrows sailors
find,
Cooped in their winged sea-girt
citadel;
The foul, the fair, the contrary,
the kind,
As breezes rise and fall, and billows
swell,
Till on some jocund morn—lo, land! and
all is well.
But not in silence pass Calypso’s
isles,
The sister tenants of the middle
deep;
There for the weary still a haven
smiles,
Though the fair goddess long has
ceased to weep,
And o’er her cliffs a fruitless
watch to keep
For him who dared prefer a mortal
bride:
Here, too, his boy essayed the dreadful
leap
Stern Mentor urged from high to
yonder tide;
While thus of both bereft, the nymph-queen doubly
sighed.
Her reign is past, her gentle glories
gone:
But trust not this; too easy youth,
beware!
A mortal sovereign holds her dangerous
throne,
And thou mayst find a new Calypso
there.
Sweet Florence! could another ever
share
This wayward, loveless heart, it
would be thine:
But checked by every tie, I may
not dare
To cast a worthless offering at
thy shrine,
Nor ask so dear a breast to feel one pang for mine.
Thus Harold deemed, as on that lady’s
eye
He looked, and met its beam without
a thought,
Save Admiration glancing harmless
by:
Love kept aloof, albeit not far
remote,
Who knew his votary often lost and
caught,
But knew him as his worshipper no
more,
And ne’er again the boy his
bosom sought:
Since now he vainly urged him to
adore,
Well deemed the little god his ancient sway was o’er.
Fair Florence found, in sooth with
some amaze,
One who, ’twas said, still
sighed to all he saw,
Withstand, unmoved, the lustre of
her gaze,
Which others hailed with real or
mimic awe,
Their hope, their doom, their punishment,
their law:
All that gay Beauty from her bondsmen
claims:
And much she marvelled that a youth
so raw
Nor felt, nor feigned at least,
the oft-told flames,
Which, though sometimes they frown, yet rarely anger
dames.
Little knew she that seeming marble
heart,
Now masked by silence or withheld
by pride,
Was not unskilful in the spoiler’s
art,
And spread its snares licentious
far and wide;
Nor from the base pursuit had turned
aside,
As long as aught was worthy to pursue:
But Harold on such arts no more
relied;
And had he doted on those eyes so
blue,
Yet never would he join the lover’s whining
crew.
Not much he kens, I ween, of woman’s
breast,
Who thinks that wanton thing is
won by sighs;
What careth she for hearts when
once possessed?
Do proper homage to thine idol’s
eyes,
But not too humbly, or she will
despise
Thee and thy suit, though told in
moving tropes;
Disguise e’en tenderness,
if thou art wise;
Brisk Confidence still best with
woman copes;
Pique her and soothe in turn, soon Passion crowns
thy hopes.
’Tis an old lesson:
Time approves it true,
And those who know it best deplore
it most;
When all is won that all desire
to woo,
The paltry prize is hardly worth
the cost:
Youth wasted, minds degraded, honour
lost,
These are thy fruits, successful
Passion! these!
If, kindly cruel, early hope is
crossed,
Still to the last it rankles, a
disease,
Not to be cured when Love itself forgets to please.
Away! nor let me loiter in my song,
For we have many a mountain path
to tread,
And many a varied shore to sail
along,
By pensive Sadness, not by Fiction,
led —
Climes, fair withal as ever mortal
head
Imagined in its little schemes of
thought;
Or e’er in new Utopias were
read:
To teach man what he might be, or
he ought;
If that corrupted thing could ever such be taught.
Dear Nature is the kindest mother
still;
Though always changing, in her aspect
mild:
From her bare bosom let me take
my fill,
Her never-weaned, though not her
favoured child.
Oh! she is fairest in her features
wild,
Where nothing polished dares pollute
her path:
To me by day or night she ever smiled,
Though I have marked her when none
other hath,
And sought her more and more, and loved her best in
wrath.
Land of Albania! where Iskander
rose;
Theme of the young, and beacon of
the wise,
And he his namesake, whose oft-baffled
foes,
Shrunk from his deeds of chivalrous
emprise:
Land of Albania! let me bend mine
eyes
On thee, thou rugged nurse of savage
men!
The cross descends, thy minarets
arise,
And the pale crescent sparkles in
the glen,
Through many a cypress grove within each city’s
ken.
Childe Harold sailed, and passed
the barren spot
Where sad Penelope o’erlooked
the wave;
And onward viewed the mount, not
yet forgot,
The lover’s refuge, and the
Lesbian’s grave.
Dark Sappho! could not verse immortal
save
That breast imbued with such immortal
fire?
Could she not live who life eternal
gave?
If life eternal may await the lyre,
That only Heaven to which Earth’s children may
aspire.
’Twas on a Grecian autumn’s
gentle eve,
Childe Harold hailed Leucadia’s
cape afar;
A spot he longed to see, nor cared
to leave:
Oft did he mark the scenes of vanished
war,
Actium, Lepanto, fatal Trafalgar:
Mark them unmoved, for he would
not delight
(Born beneath some remote inglorious
star)
In themes of bloody fray, or gallant
fight,
But loathed the bravo’s trade, and laughed at
martial wight.
But when he saw the evening star
above
Leucadia’s far-projecting
rock of woe,
And hailed the last resort of fruitless
love,
He felt, or deemed he felt, no common
glow:
And as the stately vessel glided
slow
Beneath the shadow of that ancient
mount,
He watched the billows’ melancholy
flow,
And, sunk albeit in thought as he
was wont,
More placid seemed his eye, and smooth his pallid
front.
Morn dawns; and with it stern Albania’s
hills,
Dark Suli’s rocks, and Pindus’
inland peak,
Robed half in mist, bedewed with
snowy rills,
Arrayed in many a dun and purple
streak,
Arise; and, as the clouds along
them break,
Disclose the dwelling of the mountaineer;
Here roams the wolf, the eagle whets
his beak,
Birds, beasts of prey, and wilder
men appear,
And gathering storms around convulse the closing year.
Now Harold felt himself at length
alone,
And bade to Christian tongues a
long adieu:
Now he adventured on a shore unknown,
Which all admire, but many dread
to view:
His breast was armed ’gainst
fate, his wants were few:
Peril he sought not, but ne’er
shrank to meet:
The scene was savage, but the scene
was new;
This made the ceaseless toil of
travel sweet,
Beat back keen winter’s blast; and welcomed
summer’s heat.
Here the red cross, for still the
cross is here,
Though sadly scoffed at by the circumcised,
Forgets that pride to pampered priesthood
dear;
Churchman and votary alike despised.
Foul Superstition! howsoe’er
disguised,
Idol, saint, virgin, prophet, crescent,
cross,
For whatsoever symbol thou art prized,
Thou sacerdotal gain, but general
loss!
Who from true worship’s gold can separate thy
dross.
Ambracia’s gulf behold, where
once was lost
A world for woman, lovely, harmless
thing!
In yonder rippling bay, their naval
host
Did many a Roman chief and Asian
king
To doubtful conflict, certain slaughter,
bring
Look where the second Caesar’s
trophies rose,
Now, like the hands that reared
them, withering;
Imperial anarchs, doubling human
woes!
God! was thy globe ordained for such to win and lose?
From the dark barriers of that rugged
clime,
E’en to the centre of Illyria’s
vales,
Childe Harold passed o’er
many a mount sublime,
Through lands scarce noticed in
historic tales:
Yet in famed Attica such lovely
dales
Are rarely seen; nor can fair Tempe
boast
A charm they know not; loved Parnassus
fails,
Though classic ground, and consecrated
most,
To match some spots that lurk within this lowering
coast.
He passed bleak Pindus, Acherusia’s
lake,
And left the primal city of the
land,
And onwards did his further journey
take
To greet Albania’s chief,
whose dread command
Is lawless law; for with a bloody
hand
He sways a nation, turbulent and
bold:
Yet here and there some daring mountain-band
Disdain his power, and from their
rocky hold
Hurl their defiance far, nor yield, unless to gold.
Monastic Zitza! from thy shady brow,
Thou small, but favoured spot of
holy ground!
Where’er we gaze, around,
above, below,
What rainbow tints, what magic charms
are found!
Rock, river, forest, mountain all
Amidst the grove that crowns yon
tufted hill,
Which, were it not for many a mountain
nigh
Rising in lofty ranks, and loftier
still,
Might well itself be deemed of dignity,
The convent’s white walls
glisten fair on high;
Here dwells the caloyer, nor rude
is he,
Nor niggard of his cheer:
the passer-by
Is welcome still; nor heedless will
he flee
From hence, if he delight kind Nature’s sheen
to see.
Here in the sultriest season let
him rest,
Fresh is the green beneath those
aged trees;
Here winds of gentlest wing will
fan his breast,
From heaven itself he may inhale
the breeze:
The plain is far beneath—oh!
let him seize
Pure pleasure while he can; the
scorching ray
Here pierceth not, impregnate with
disease:
Then let his length the loitering
pilgrim lay,
And gaze, untired, the morn, the noon, the eve away.
Dusky and huge, enlarging on the
sight,
Nature’s volcanic amphitheatre,
Chimera’s alps extend from
left to right:
Beneath, a living valley seems to
stir;
Flocks play, trees wave, streams
flow, the mountain fir
Nodding above; behold black Acheron!
Once consecrated to the sepulchre.
Pluto! if this be hell I look upon,
Close shamed Elysium’s gates, my shade shall
seek for none.
No city’s towers pollute the
lovely view;
Unseen is Yanina, though not remote,
Veiled by the screen of hills:
here men are few,
Scanty the hamlet, rare the lonely
cot;
But, peering down each precipice,
the goat
Browseth: and, pensive o’er
his scattered flock,
The little shepherd in his white
capote
Doth lean his boyish form along
the rock,
Or in his cave awaits the tempest’s short-lived
shock.
Oh! where, Dodona, is thine aged
grove,
Prophetic fount, and oracle divine?
What valley echoed the response
of Jove?
What trace remaineth of the Thunderer’s
shrine?
All, all forgotten—and
shall man repine
That his frail bonds to fleeting
life are broke?
Cease, fool! the fate of gods may
well be thine:
Wouldst thou survive the marble
or the oak,
When nations, tongues, and worlds must sink beneath
the stroke?
Epirus’ bounds recede, and
mountains fail;
Tired of up-gazing still, the wearied
eye
Reposes gladly on as smooth a vale
As ever Spring yclad in grassy dye:
E’en on a plain no humble
beauties lie,
Where some bold river breaks the
long expanse,
And woods along the banks are waving
high,
Whose shadows in the glassy waters
dance,
Or with the moonbeam sleep in Midnight’s solemn
trance.
The sun had sunk behind vast Tomerit,
The Laos wide and fierce came roaring
by;
The shades of wonted night were
gathering yet,
When, down the steep banks winding
wearily
Childe Harold saw, like meteors
in the sky,
The glittering minarets of Tepalen,
Whose walls o’erlook the stream;
and drawing nigh,
He heard the busy hum of warrior-men
Swelling the breeze that sighed along the lengthening
glen.
He passed the sacred harem’s
silent tower,
And underneath the wide o’erarching
gate
Surveyed the dwelling of this chief
of power
Where all around proclaimed his
high estate.
Amidst no common pomp the despot
sate,
While busy preparation shook the
court;
Slaves, eunuchs, soldiers, guests,
and santons wait;
Within, a palace, and without a
fort,
Here men of every clime appear to make resort.
Richly caparisoned, a ready row
Of armed horse, and many a warlike
store,
Circled the wide-extending court
below;
Above, strange groups adorned the
corridor;
And ofttimes through the area’s
echoing door,
Some high-capped Tartar spurred
his steed away;
The Turk, the Greek, the Albanian,
and the Moor,
Here mingled in their many-hued
array,
While the deep war-drum’s sound announced the
close of day.
The wild Albanian kirtled to his
knee,
With shawl-girt head and ornamented
gun,
And gold-embroidered garments, fair
to see:
The crimson-scarfed men of Macedon;
The Delhi with his cap of terror
on,
And crooked glaive; the lively,
supple Greek;
And swarthy Nubia’s mutilated
son;
The bearded Turk, that rarely deigns
to speak,
Master of all around, too potent to be meek,
Are mixed conspicuous: some
recline in groups,
Scanning the motley scene that varies
round;
There some grave Moslem to devotion
stoops,
And some that smoke, and some that
play are found;
Here the Albanian proudly treads
the ground;
Half-whispering there the Greek
is heard to prate;
Hark! from the mosque the nightly
solemn sound,
The muezzin’s call doth shake
the minaret,
‘There is no god but God!—to prayer—lo!
God is great!’
Just at this season Ramazani’s
fast
Through the long day its penance
did maintain.
But when the lingering twilight
hour was past,
Revel and feast assumed the rule
again:
Now all was bustle, and the menial
train
Prepared and spread the plenteous
board within;
The vacant gallery now seemed made
in vain,
But from the chambers came the mingling
din,
As page and slave anon were passing out and in.
Here woman’s voice is never
heard: apart
And scarce permitted, guarded, veiled,
to move,
She yields to one her person and
her heart,
Tamed to her cage, nor feels a wish
to rove;
For, not unhappy in her master’s
love,
And joyful in a mother’s gentlest
cares,
Blest cares! all other feelings
far above!
Herself more sweetly rears the babe
she bears,
Who never quits the breast, no meaner passion shares.
In marble-paved pavilion, where
a spring
Of living water from the centre
rose,
Whose bubbling did a genial freshness
fling,
And soft voluptuous couches breathed
repose,
Ali reclined, a man of war and woes:
Yet in his lineaments ye cannot
trace,
While Gentleness her milder radiance
throws
Along that aged venerable face,
The deeds that lurk beneath, and stain him with disgrace.
It is not that yon hoary lengthening
beard
Ill suits the passions which belong
to youth:
Love conquers age—so
Hafiz hath averred,
So sings the Teian, and he sings
in sooth —
But crimes that scorn the tender
voice of ruth,
Beseeming all men ill, but most
the man
In years, have marked him with a
tiger’s tooth:
Blood follows blood, and through
their mortal span,
In bloodier acts conclude those who with blood began.
Mid many things most new to ear
and eye,
The pilgrim rested here his weary
feet,
And gazed around on Moslem luxury,
Till quickly wearied with that spacious
seat
Of Wealth and Wantonness, the choice
retreat
Of sated Grandeur from the city’s
noise:
And were it humbler, it in sooth
were sweet;
But Peace abhorreth artificial joys,
And Pleasure, leagued with Pomp, the zest of both
destroys.
Fierce are Albania’s children,
yet they lack
Not virtues, were those virtues
more mature.
Where is the foe that ever saw their
back?
Who can so well the toil of war
endure?
Their native fastnesses not more
secure
Than they in doubtful time of troublous
need:
Their wrath how deadly! but their
friendship sure,
When Gratitude or Valour bids them
bleed,
Unshaken rushing on where’er their chief may
lead.
Childe Harold saw them in their
chieftain’s tower,
Thronging to war in splendour and
success;
And after viewed them, when, within
their power,
Himself awhile the victim of distress;
That saddening hour when bad men
hotlier press:
But these did shelter him beneath
their roof,
When less barbarians would have
cheered him less,
And fellow-countrymen have stood
aloof —
In aught that tries the heart how few withstand the
proof!
It chanced that adverse winds once
drove his bark
Full on the coast of Suli’s
shaggy shore,
When all around was desolate and
dark;
To land was perilous, to sojourn
more;
Yet for awhile the mariners forbore,
Dubious to trust where treachery
might lurk:
At length they ventured forth, though
doubting sore
That those who loathe alike the
Frank and Turk
Might once again renew their ancient butcher-work.
Vain fear! the Suliotes stretched
the welcome hand,
Led them o’er rocks and past
the dangerous swamp,
Kinder than polished slaves, though
not so bland,
And piled the hearth, and wrung
their garments damp,
And filled the bowl, and trimmed
the cheerful lamp,
And spread their fare: though
homely, all they had:
Such conduct bears Philanthropy’s
rare stamp —
To rest the weary and to soothe
the sad,
Doth lesson happier men, and shames at least the bad.
It came to pass, that when he did
address
Himself to quit at length this mountain
land,
Combined marauders half-way barred
egress,
And wasted far and near with glaive
and brand;
And therefore did he take a trusty
band
To traverse Acarnania forest wide,
In war well-seasoned, and with labours
tanned,
Till he did greet white Achelous’
tide,
And from his farther bank AEtolia’s wolds espied.
Where lone Utraikey forms its circling
cove,
And weary waves retire to gleam
at rest,
How brown the foliage of the green
hill’s grove,
Nodding at midnight o’er the
calm bay’s breast,
As winds come whispering lightly
from the west,
Kissing, not ruffling, the blue
deep’s serene:
Here Harold was received a welcome
guest;
Nor did he pass unmoved the gentle
scene,
For many a joy could he from night’s soft presence
glean.
On the smooth shore the night-fires
brightly blazed,
The feast was done, the red wine
circling fast,
And he that unawares had there ygazed
With gaping wonderment had stared
aghast;
For ere night’s midmost, stillest
hour was past,
The native revels of the troop began;
Each palikar his sabre from him
cast,
And bounding hand in hand, man linked
to man,
Yelling their uncouth dirge, long danced the kirtled
clan.
Childe Harold at a little distance
stood,
And viewed, but not displeased,
the revelrie,
Nor hated harmless mirth, however
rude:
In sooth, it was no vulgar sight
to see
Their barbarous, yet their not indecent,
glee:
And as the flames along their faces
gleamed,
Their gestures nimble, dark eyes
flashing free,
The long wild locks that to their
girdles streamed,
While thus in concert they this lay half sang, half
screamed:
Tambourgi! Tambourgi! thy larum afar
Gives hope to the valiant, and promise of war;
All the sons of the mountains arise at the note,
Chimariot, Illyrian, and dark Suliote!
Oh! who is more brave than a dark Suliote,
To his snowy camese and his shaggy capote?
To the wolf and the vulture he leaves his wild flock,
And descends to the plain like the stream from the
rock.
Shall the sons of Chimari, who never forgive
The fault of a friend, bid an enemy live?
Let those guns so unerring such vengeance forego?
What mark is so fair as the breast of a foe?
Macedonia sends forth her invincible race;
For a time they abandon the cave and the chase:
But those scarves of blood-red shall be redder, before
The sabre is sheathed and the battle is o’er.
Then the pirates of Parga that dwell by the waves,
And teach the pale Franks what it is to be slaves,
Shall leave on the beach the long galley and oar,
And track to his covert the captive on shore.
I ask not the pleasure that riches supply,
My sabre shall win what the feeble must buy:
Shall win the young bride with her long flowing hair,
And many a maid from her mother shall tear.
I love the fair face of the maid in her youth;
Her caresses shall lull me, her music shall soothe:
Let her bring from her chamber the many-toned lyre,
And sing us a song on the fall of her sire.
Remember the moment when Previsa fell,
The shrieks of the conquered, the conqueror’s
yell;
The roofs that we fired, and the plunder we shared,
The wealthy we slaughtered, the lovely we spared.
I talk not of mercy, I talk not of fear;
He neither must know who would serve the Vizier;
Since the days of our prophet, the crescent ne’er
saw
A chief ever glorious like Ali Pasha.
Dark Muchtar his son to the Danube is sped,
Let the yellow-haired Giaours view his horsetail with
dread;
When his Delhis come dashing in blood o’er the
banks,
How few shall escape from the Muscovite ranks!
Selictar! unsheath then our chief’s scimitar:
Tambourgi! thy larum gives promise of war.
Ye mountains that see us descend to the shore,
Shall view us as victors, or view us no more!
Fair Greece! sad relic of departed
worth!
Immortal, though no more; though
fallen, great!
Who now shall lead thy scattered
children forth,
And long accustomed bondage uncreate?
Not such thy sons who whilome did
await,
The hopeless warriors of a willing
doom,
In bleak Thermopylae’s sepulchral
strait —
Oh, who that gallant spirit shall
resume,
Leap from Eurotas’ banks, and call thee from
the tomb?
Spirit of Freedom! when on Phyle’s
brow
Thou sat’st with Thrasybulus
and his train,
Couldst thou forbode the dismal
hour which now
Dims the green beauties of thine
Attic plain?
Not thirty tyrants now enforce the
chain,
But every carle can lord it o’er
thy land;
Nor rise thy sons, but idly rail
in vain,
Trembling beneath the scourge of
Turkish hand,
From birth till death enslaved; in word, in deed,
unmanned.
In all save form alone, how changed!
and who
That marks the fire still sparkling
in each eye,
Who would but deem their bosom burned
anew
With thy unquenched beam, lost Liberty!
And many dream withal the hour is
nigh
That gives them back their fathers’
heritage:
For foreign arms and aid they fondly
sigh,
Nor solely dare encounter hostile
rage,
Or tear their name defiled from Slavery’s mournful
page.
Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not
Who would be free themselves must
strike the blow?
By their right arms the conquest
must be wrought?
Will Gaul or Muscovite redress ye?
No!
True, they may lay your proud despoilers
low,
But not for you will Freedom’s
altars flame.
Shades of the Helots! triumph o’er
your foe:
Greece! change thy lords, thy state
is still the same;
Thy glorious day is o’er, but not thy years
of shame.
The city won for Allah from the
Giaour,
The Giaour from Othman’s race
again may wrest;
And the Serai’s impenetrable
tower
Receive the fiery Frank, her former
guest;
Or Wahab’s rebel brood, who
dared divest
The Prophet’s tomb of all
its pious spoil,
May wind their path of blood along
the West;
But ne’er will Freedom seek
this fated soil,
But slave succeed to slave through years of endless
toil.
Yet mark their mirth—ere
lenten days begin,
That penance which their holy rites
prepare
To shrive from man his weight of
mortal sin,
By daily abstinence and nightly
prayer;
But ere his sackcloth garb Repentance
wear,
Some days of joyaunce are decreed
to all,
To take of pleasaunce each his secret
share,
In motley robe to dance at masking
ball,
And join the mimic train of merry Carnival.
And whose more rife with merriment
than thine,
O Stamboul! once the empress of
their reign?
Though turbans now pollute Sophia’s
shrine
And Greece her very altars eyes
in vain:
(Alas! her woes will still pervade
my strain!)
Gay were her minstrels once, for
free her throng,
All felt the common joy they now
must feign;
Nor oft I’ve seen such sight,
nor heard such song,
As wooed the eye, and thrilled the Bosphorus along.
Loud was the lightsome tumult on
the shore;
Oft Music changed, but never ceased
her tone,
And timely echoed back the measured
oar,
And rippling waters made a pleasant
moan:
The Queen of tides on high consenting
shone;
And when a transient breeze swept
o’er the wave,
’Twas as if, darting from
her heavenly throne,
A brighter glance her form reflected
gave,
Till sparkling billows seemed to light the banks they
lave.
Glanced many a light caique along
the foam,
Danced on the shore the daughters
of the land,
No thought had man or maid of rest
or home,
While many a languid eye and thrilling
hand
Exchanged the look few bosoms may
withstand,
Or gently pressed, returned the
pressure still:
Oh Love! young Love! bound in thy
rosy band,
Let sage or cynic prattle as he
will,
These hours, and only these, redeemed Life’s
years of ill!
But, midst the throng in merry masquerade,
Lurk there no hearts that throb
with secret pain,
E’en through the closest searment
half-betrayed?
To such the gentle murmurs of the
main
Seem to re-echo all they mourn in
vain;
To such the gladness of the gamesome
crowd
Is source of wayward thought and
stern disdain:
How do they loathe the laughter
idly loud,
And long to change the robe of revel for the shroud!
This must he feel, the true-born
son of Greece,
If Greece one true-born patriot
can boast:
Not such as prate of war but skulk
in peace,
The bondsman’s peace, who
sighs for all he lost,
Yet with smooth smile his tyrant
can accost,
And wield the slavish sickle, not
the sword:
Ah, Greece! they love thee least
who owe thee most —
Their birth, their blood, and that
sublime record
Of hero sires, who shame thy now degenerate horde!
When riseth Lacedaemon’s hardihood,
When Thebes Epaminondas rears again,
When Athens’ children are
with hearts endued,
When Grecian mothers shall give
birth to men,
Then mayst thou be restored; but
not till then.
A thousand years scarce serve to
form a state;
An hour may lay it in the dust:
and when
Can man its shattered splendour
renovate,
Recall its virtues back, and vanquish Time and Fate?
And yet how lovely in thine age
of woe,
Land of lost gods and godlike men,
art thou!
Thy vales of evergreen, thy hills
of snow,
Proclaim thee Nature’s varied
favourite now;
Thy fanes, thy temples to the surface
bow,
Commingling slowly with heroic earth,
Broke by the share of every rustic
plough:
So perish monuments of mortal birth,
So perish all in turn, save well-recorded worth;
Save where some solitary column
mourns
Above its prostrate brethren of
the cave;
Save where Tritonia’s airy
shrine adorns
Colonna’s cliff, and gleams
along the wave;
Save o’er some warrior’s
half-forgotten grave,
Where the grey stones and unmolested
grass
Ages, but not oblivion, feebly brave,
While strangers only not regardless
pass,
Lingering like me, perchance, to gaze, and sigh ‘Alas!’
Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags
as wild:
Sweet are thy groves, and verdant
are thy fields,
Thine olives ripe as when Minerva
smiled,
And still his honeyed wealth Hymettus
yields;
There the blithe bee his fragrant
fortress builds,
The freeborn wanderer of thy mountain
air;
Apollo still thy long, long summer
gilds,
Still in his beam Mendeli’s
marbles glare;
Art, Glory, Freedom fail, but Nature still is fair.
Where’er we tread, ’tis
haunted, holy ground;
No earth of thine is lost in vulgar
mould,
But one vast realm of wonder spreads
around,
And all the Muse’s tales seem
truly told,
Till the sense aches with gazing
to behold
The scenes our earliest dreams have
dwelt upon:
Each hill and dale, each deepening
glen and wold,
Defies the power which crushed thy
temples gone:
Age shakes Athena’s tower, but spares gray Marathon.
The sun, the soil, but not the slave,
the same;
Unchanged in all except its foreign
lord —
Preserves alike its bounds and boundless
fame;
The battle-field, where Persia’s
victim horde
First bowed beneath the brunt of
Hellas’ sword,
As on the morn to distant Glory
dear,
When Marathon became a magic word;
Which uttered, to the hearer’s
eye appear
The camp, the host, the fight, the conqueror’s
career.
The flying Mede, his shaftless broken
bow;
The fiery Greek, his red pursuing
spear;
Mountains above, Earth’s,
Ocean’s plain below;
Death in the front, Destruction
in the rear!
Such was the scene—what
now remaineth here?
What sacred trophy marks the hallowed
ground,
Recording Freedom’s smile
and Asia’s tear?
The rifled urn, the violated mound,
The dust thy courser’s hoof, rude stranger!
spurns around.
Yet to the remnants of thy splendour
past
Shall pilgrims, pensive, but unwearied,
throng:
Long shall the voyager, with th’
Ionian blast,
Hail the bright clime of battle
and of song;
Long shall thine annals and immortal
tongue
Fill with thy fame the youth of
many a shore:
Boast of the aged! lesson of the
young!
Which sages venerate and bards adore,
As Pallas and the Muse unveil their awful lore.
The parted bosom clings to wonted
home,
If aught that’s kindred cheer
the welcome hearth;
He that is lonely, hither let him
roam,
And gaze complacent on congenial
earth.
Greece is no lightsome land of social
mirth;
But he whom Sadness sootheth may
abide,
And scarce regret the region of
his birth,
When wandering slow by Delphi’s
sacred side,
Or gazing o’er the plains where Greek and Persian
died.
Let such approach this consecrated
land,
And pass in peace along the magic
waste:
But spare its relics—let
no busy hand
Deface the scenes, already how defaced!
Not for such purpose were these
altars placed.
Revere the remnants nations once
revered;
So may our country’s name
be undisgraced,
So mayst thou prosper where thy
youth was reared,
By every honest joy of love and life endeared!
For thee, who thus in too protracted
song
Hath soothed thine idlesse with
inglorious lays,
Soon shall thy voice be lost amid
the throng
Of louder minstrels in these later
days:
To such resign the strife for fading
bays —
Ill may such contest now the spirit
move
Which heeds nor keen reproach nor
partial praise,
Since cold each kinder heart that
might approve,
And none are left to please where none are left to
love.
Thou too art gone, thou loved and
lovely one!
Whom youth and youth’s affections
bound to me;
Who did for me what none beside
have done,
Nor shrank from one albeit unworthy
thee.
What is my being? thou hast ceased
Oh! ever loving, lovely, and beloved!
How selfish Sorrow ponders on the
past,
And clings to thoughts now better
far removed!
But Time shall tear thy shadow from
me last.
All thou couldst have of mine, stern
Death, thou hast:
The parent, friend, and now the
more than friend;
Ne’er yet for one thine arrows
flew so fast,
And grief with grief continuing
still to blend,
Hath snatched the little joy that life had yet to
lend.
Then must I plunge again into the
crowd,
And follow all that Peace disdains
to seek?
Where Revel calls, and Laughter,
vainly loud,
False to the heart, distorts the
hollow cheek,
To leave the flagging spirit doubly
weak!
Still o’er the features, which
perforce they cheer,
To feign the pleasure or conceal
the pique;
Smiles form the channel of a future
tear,
Or raise the writhing lip with ill-dissembled sneer.
What is the worst of woes that wait
on age?
What stamps the wrinkle deeper on
the brow?
To view each loved one blotted from
life’s page,
And be alone on earth, as I am now.
Before the Chastener humbly let
me bow,
O’er hearts divided and o’er
hopes destroyed:
Roll on, vain days! full reckless
may ye flow,
Since Time hath reft whate’er
my soul enjoyed,
And with the ills of eld mine earlier years alloyed.
CANTO THE THIRD.
Is thy face like thy mother’s,
my fair child!
Ada! sole daughter of my house and
heart?
When last I saw thy young blue eyes,
they smiled,
And then we parted,—not
as now we part,
But with a hope. —
Awaking
with a start,
The waters heave around me; and
on high
The winds lift up their voices:
I depart,
Whither I know not; but the hour’s
gone by,
When Albion’s lessening shores could grieve
or glad mine eye.
Once more upon the waters! yet once
more!
And the waves bound beneath me as
a steed
That knows his rider. Welcome
to their roar!
Swift be their guidance, wheresoe’er
it lead!
Though the strained mast should
quiver as a reed,
And the rent canvas fluttering strew
the gale,
Still must I on; for I am as a weed,
Flung from the rock, on Ocean’s
foam, to sail
Where’er the surge may sweep, the tempest’s
breath prevail.
In my youth’s summer I did
sing of One,
The wandering outlaw of his own
dark mind;
Again I seize the theme, then but
begun,
And bear it with me, as the rushing
wind
Bears the cloud onwards: in
that tale I find
The furrows of long thought, and
dried-up tears,
Which, ebbing, leave a sterile track
behind,
O’er which all heavily the
journeying years
Plod the last sands of life—where not a
flower appears.
Since my young days of passion—joy,
or pain,
Perchance my heart and harp have
lost a string,
And both may jar: it may be,
that in vain
I would essay as I have sung to
sing.
Yet, though a dreary strain, to
this I cling,
So that it wean me from the weary
dream
Of selfish grief or gladness—so
it fling
Forgetfulness around me—it
shall seem
To me, though to none else, a not ungrateful theme.
He who, grown aged in this world
of woe,
In deeds, not years, piercing the
depths of life,
So that no wonder waits him; nor
below
Can love or sorrow, fame, ambition,
strife,
Cut to his heart again with the
keen knife
Of silent, sharp endurance:
he can tell
Why thought seeks refuge in lone
caves, yet rife
With airy images, and shapes which
dwell
Still unimpaired, though old, in the soul’s
haunted cell.
’Tis to create, and in creating
live
A being more intense, that we endow
With form our fancy, gaining as
we give
The life we image, even as I do
now.
What am I? Nothing:
but not so art thou,
Soul of my thought! with whom I
traverse earth,
Invisible but gazing, as I glow
Mixed with thy spirit, blended with
thy birth,
And feeling still with thee in my crushed feelings’
dearth.
Yet must I think less wildly:
I have thought
Too long and darkly, till my brain
became,
In its own eddy boiling and o’erwrought,
A whirling gulf of phantasy and
flame:
And thus, untaught in youth my heart
to tame,
My springs of life were poisoned.
’Tis too late!
Yet am I changed; though still enough
the same
In strength to bear what time cannot
abate,
And feed on bitter fruits without accusing fate.
Something too much of this:
but now ’tis past,
And the spell closes with its silent
seal.
Long-absent Harold reappears at
last;
He of the breast which fain no more
would feel,
Wrung with the wounds which kill
not, but ne’er heal;
Yet Time, who changes all, had altered
him
In soul and aspect as in age:
years steal
Fire from the mind as vigour from
the limb;
And life’s enchanted cup but sparkles near the
brim.
His had been quaffed too quickly,
and he found
The dregs were wormwood; but he
filled again,
And from a purer fount, on holier
ground,
And deemed its spring perpetual;
but in vain!
Still round him clung invisibly
a chain
Which galled for ever, fettering
though unseen,
And heavy though it clanked not;
worn with pain,
Which pined although it spoke not,
and grew keen,
Entering with every step he took through many a scene.
Secure in guarded coldness, he had
mixed
Again in fancied safety with his
kind,
And deemed his spirit now so firmly
fixed
And sheathed with an invulnerable
mind,
That, if no joy, no sorrow lurked
behind;
And he, as one, might midst the
many stand
Unheeded, searching through the
crowd to find
Fit speculation; such as in strange
land
He found in wonder-works of God and Nature’s
hand.
But who can view the ripened rose,
nor seek
To wear it? who can curiously behold
The smoothness and the sheen of
beauty’s cheek,
Nor feel the heart can never all
grow old?
Who can contemplate fame through
clouds unfold
The star which rises o’er
her steep, nor climb?
Harold, once more within the vortex
rolled
On with the giddy circle, chasing
Time,
Yet with a nobler aim than in his youth’s fond
prime.
But soon he knew himself the most
unfit
Of men to herd with Man; with whom
he held
Little in common; untaught to submit
His thoughts to others, though his
soul was quelled,
In youth by his own thoughts; still
uncompelled,
He would not yield dominion of his
mind
To spirits against whom his own
rebelled;
Proud though in desolation; which
could find
A life within itself, to breathe without mankind.
Where rose the mountains, there
to him were friends;
Where rolled the ocean, thereon
was his home;
Where a blue sky, and glowing clime,
extends,
He had the passion and the power
to roam;
The desert, forest, cavern, breaker’s
foam,
Were unto him companionship; they
spake
A mutual language, clearer than
the tome
Of his land’s tongue, which
he would oft forsake
For nature’s pages glassed by sunbeams on the
lake.
Like the Chaldean, he could watch
the stars,
Till he had peopled them with beings
bright
As their own beams; and earth, and
earth-born jars,
And human frailties, were forgotten
quite:
Could he have kept his spirit to
But in Man’s dwellings he
became a thing
Restless and worn, and stern and
wearisome,
Drooped as a wild-born falcon with
clipt wing,
To whom the boundless air alone
were home:
Then came his fit again, which to
o’ercome,
As eagerly the barred-up bird will
beat
His breast and beak against his
wiry dome
Till the blood tinge his plumage,
so the heat
Of his impeded soul would through his bosom eat.
Self-exiled Harold wanders forth
again,
With naught of hope left, but with
less of gloom;
The very knowledge that he lived
in vain,
That all was over on this side the
tomb,
Had made Despair a smilingness assume,
Which, though ’twere wild—as
on the plundered wreck
When mariners would madly meet their
doom
With draughts intemperate on the
sinking deck —
Did yet inspire a cheer, which he forbore to check.
Stop! for thy tread is on an empire’s
dust!
An earthquake’s spoil is sepulchred
below!
Is the spot marked with no colossal
bust?
Nor column trophied for triumphal
show?
None; but the moral’s truth
tells simpler so,
As the ground was before, thus let
it be; —
How that red rain hath made the
harvest grow!
And is this all the world has gained
by thee,
Thou first and last of fields! king-making Victory?
And Harold stands upon this place
of skulls,
The grave of France, the deadly
Waterloo!
How in an hour the power which gave
annuls
Its gifts, transferring fame as
fleeting too!
In ‘pride of place’
here last the eagle flew,
Then tore with bloody talon the
rent plain,
Pierced by the shaft of banded nations
through:
Ambition’s life and labours
all were vain;
He wears the shattered links of the world’s
broken chain.
Fit retribution! Gaul may
champ the bit,
And foam in fetters, but is Earth
more free?
Did nations combat to make one
submit;
Or league to teach all kings true
sovereignty?
What! shall reviving thraldom again
be
The patched-up idol of enlightened
days?
Shall we, who struck the Lion down,
shall we
Pay the Wolf homage? proffering
lowly gaze
And servile knees to thrones? No; prove
before ye praise!
If not, o’er one fall’n
despot boast no more!
In vain fair cheeks were furrowed
with hot tears
For Europe’s flowers long
rooted up before
The trampler of her vineyards; in
vain years
Of death, depopulation, bondage,
fears,
Have all been borne, and broken
by the accord
Of roused-up millions: all
that most endears
Glory, is when the myrtle wreathes
a sword
Such as Harmodius drew on Athens’ tyrant lord.
There was a sound of revelry by
night,
And Belgium’s capital had
gathered then
Her Beauty and her Chivalry, and
bright
The lamps shone o’er fair
women and brave men;
A thousand hearts beat happily;
and when
Music arose with its voluptuous
swell,
Soft eyes looked love to eyes which
spake again,
And all went merry as a marriage
bell;
But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising
knell!
Did ye not hear it?—No;
’twas but the wind,
Or the car rattling o’er the
stony street;
On with the dance! let joy be unconfined;
No sleep till morn, when Youth and
Pleasure meet
To chase the glowing Hours with
flying feet.
But hark!—that heavy
sound breaks in once more,
As if the clouds its echo would
repeat;
And nearer, clearer, deadlier than
before!
Arm! arm! it is—it is—the cannon’s
opening roar!
Within a windowed niche of that
high hall
Sate Brunswick’s fated chieftain;
he did hear
That sound, the first amidst the
festival,
And caught its tone with Death’s
prophetic ear;
And when they smiled because he
deemed it near,
His heart more truly knew that peal
too well
Which stretched his father on a
bloody bier,
And roused the vengeance blood alone
could quell:
He rushed into the field, and, foremost fighting,
fell.
Ah! then and there was hurrying
to and fro,
And gathering tears, and tremblings
of distress,
And cheeks all pale, which but an
hour ago
Blushed at the praise of their own
loveliness;
And there were sudden partings,
such as press
The life from out young hearts,
and choking sighs
Which ne’er might be repeated:
who would guess
If ever more should meet those mutual
eyes,
Since upon night so sweet such awful morn could rise!
And there was mounting in hot haste:
the steed,
The mustering squadron, and the
clattering car,
Went pouring forward with impetuous
speed,
And swiftly forming in the ranks
of war;
And the deep thunder peal on peal
afar;
And near, the beat of the alarming
drum
Roused up the soldier ere the morning
star;
While thronged the citizens with
terror dumb,
Or whispering, with white lips—’The
foe! They come! they come!’
And wild and high the ‘Cameron’s
gathering’ rose,
The war-note of Lochiel, which Albyn’s
hills
Have heard, and heard, too, have
her Saxon foes:
How in the noon of night that pibroch
thrills
Savage and shrill! But with
the breath which fills
Their mountain-pipe, so fill the
mountaineers
With the fierce native daring which
instils
The stirring memory of a thousand
years,
And Evan’s, Donald’s fame rings in each
clansman’s ears.
And Ardennes waves above them her
green leaves,
Dewy with Nature’s tear-drops,
as they pass,
Grieving, if aught inanimate e’er
grieves,
Over the unreturniug brave,—alas!
Ere evening to be trodden like the
grass
Which now beneath them, but above
shall grow
In its next verdure, when this fiery
mass
Of living valour, rolling on the
foe,
And burning with high hope, shall moulder cold and
low.
Last noon beheld them full of lusty
life,
Last eve in Beauty’s circle
proudly gay,
The midnight brought the signal-sound
of strife,
The morn the marshalling in arms,—the
day
Battle’s magnificently stern
array!
The thunder-clouds close o’er
it, which when rent
The earth is covered thick with
other clay,
Which her own clay shall cover,
heaped and pent,
Rider and horse,—friend, foe,—in
one red burial blent!
Their praise is hymned by loftier
harps than mine;
Yet one I would select from that
proud throng,
Partly because they blend me with
his line,
And partly that I did his sire some
wrong,
And partly that bright names will
hallow song;
And his was of the bravest, and
when showered
The death-bolts deadliest the thinned
files along,
Even where the thickest of war’s
tempest lowered,
They reached no nobler breast than thine, young, gallant
Howard!
There have been tears and breaking
hearts for thee,
And mine were nothing, had I such
to give;
But when I stood beneath the fresh
green tree,
Which living waves where thou didst
cease to live,
And saw around me the wild field
revive
With fruits and fertile promise,
and the Spring
Come forth her work of gladness
to contrive,
With all her reckless birds upon
the wing,
I turned from all she brought to those she could not
bring.
I turned to thee, to thousands,
of whom each
And one as all a ghastly gap did
make
In his own kind and kindred, whom
to teach
Forgetfulness were mercy for their
sake;
The Archangel’s trump, not
Glory’s, must awake
Those whom they thirst for; though
the sound of Fame
May for a moment soothe, it cannot
slake
The fever of vain longing, and the
name
So honoured, but assumes a stronger, bitterer claim.
They mourn, but smile at length;
and, smiling, mourn:
The tree will wither long before
it fall:
The hull drives on, though mast
and sail be torn;
The roof-tree sinks, but moulders
on the hall
In massy hoariness; the ruined wall
Stands when its wind-worn battlements
are gone;
The bars survive the captive they
enthral;
The day drags through though storms
keep out the sun;
And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on:
E’en as a broken mirror, which
the glass
In every fragment multiplies; and
makes
A thousand images of one that was,
The same, and still the more, the
more it breaks;
And thus the heart will do which
not forsakes,
Living in shattered guise, and still,
and cold,
And bloodless, with its sleepless
sorrow aches,
Yet withers on till all without
is old,
Showing no visible sign, for such things are untold.
There is a very life in our despair,
Vitality of poison,—a
quick root
Which feeds these deadly branches;
for it were
As nothing did we die; but life
will suit
Itself to Sorrow’s most detested
fruit,
Like to the apples on the Dead Sea
shore,
All ashes to the taste: Did
man compute
Existence by enjoyment, and count
o’er
Such hours ’gainst years of life,—say,
would he name threescore?
The Psalmist numbered out the years
of man:
They are enough: and if thy
tale be true,
Thou, who didst grudge him e’en
that fleeting span,
More than enough, thou fatal Waterloo!
Millions of tongues record thee,
and anew
Their children’s lips shall
echo them, and say,
’Here, where the sword united
nations drew,
Our countrymen were warring on that
day!’
And this is much, and all which will not pass away.
There sunk the greatest, nor the
worst of men,
Whose spirit anithetically mixed
One moment of the mightiest, and
again
On little objects with like firmness
fixed;
Extreme in all things! hadst thou
been betwixt,
Thy throne had still been thine,
or never been;
For daring made thy rise as fall:
thou seek’st
Even now to reassume the imperial
mien,
And shake again the world, the Thunderer of the scene!
Conqueror and captive of the earth
art thou!
She trembles at thee still, and
thy wild name
Was ne’er more bruited in
men’s minds than now
That thou art nothing, save the
jest of Fame,
Who wooed thee once, thy vassal,
and became
The flatterer of thy fierceness,
till thou wert
A god unto thyself; nor less the
same
To the astounded kingdoms all inert,
Who deemed thee for a time whate’er thou didst
assert.
Oh, more or less than man—in
high or low,
Battling with nations, flying from
the field;
Now making monarchs’ necks
thy footstool, now
More than thy meanest soldier taught
to yield:
An empire thou couldst crush, command,
rebuild,
But govern not thy pettiest passion,
nor,
However deeply in men’s spirits
skilled,
Look through thine own, nor curb
the lust of war,
Nor learn that tempted Fate will leave the loftiest
star.
Yet well thy soul hath brooked the
turning tide
With that untaught innate philosophy,
Which, be it wisdom, coldness, or
deep pride,
Is gall and wormwood to an enemy.
When the whole host of hatred stood
hard by,
To watch and mock thee shrinking,
thou hast smiled
With a sedate and all-enduring eye;
When Fortune fled her spoiled and
favourite child,
He stood unbowed beneath the ills upon him piled.
Sager than in thy fortunes; for
in them
Ambition steeled thee on to far
too show
That just habitual scorn, which
could contemn
Men and their thoughts; ’twas
wise to feel, not so
To wear it ever on thy lip and brow,
And spurn the instruments thou wert
to use
Till they were turned unto thine
overthrow:
’Tis but a worthless world
to win or lose;
So hath it proved to thee, and all such lot who choose.
If, like a tower upon a headland
rock,
Thou hadst been made to stand or
fall alone,
Such scorn of man had helped to
brave the shock;
But men’s thoughts were the
steps which paved thy throne,
their admiration thy best weapon
shone;
The part of Philip’s son was
thine, not then
(Unless aside thy purple had been
thrown)
Like stern Diogenes to mock at men;
For sceptred cynics earth were far too wide a den.
But quiet to quick bosoms is a hell,
And there hath been thy bane;
there is a fire
And motion of the soul, which will
not dwell
In its own narrow being, but aspire
Beyond the fitting medium of desire;
And, but once kindled, quenchless
evermore,
Preys upon high adventure, nor can
tire
Of aught but rest; a fever at the
core,
Fatal to him who bears, to all who ever bore.
This makes the madmen who have made
men mad
By their contagion! Conquerors
and Kings,
Founders of sects and systems, to
whom add
Sophists, Bards, Statesmen, all
unquiet things
Which stir too strongly the soul’s
secret springs,
And are themselves the fools to
those they fool;
Envied, yet how unenviable! what
stings
Are theirs! One breast laid
open were a school
Which would unteach mankind the lust to shine or rule:
Their breath is agitation, and their
life
A storm whereon they ride, to sink
at last,
And yet so nursed and bigoted to
strife,
That should their days, surviving
perils past,
Melt to calm twilight, they feel
overcast
With sorrow and supineness, and
so die;
Even as a flame unfed, which runs
to waste
With its own flickering, or a sword
laid by,
Which eats into itself, and rusts ingloriously.
He who ascends to mountain-tops,
shall find
The loftiest peaks most wrapt in
clouds and snow;
He who surpasses or subdues mankind,
Must look down on the hate of those
below.
Though high above the sun of
glory glow,
And far beneath the earth and
ocean spread,
round him are icy rocks, and loudly
blow
Contending tempests on his naked
head,
And thus reward the toils which to those summits led.
Away with these; true Wisdom’s
world will be
Within its own creation, or in thine,
Maternal Nature! for who teems like
thee,
Thus on the banks of thy majestic
Rhine?
There Harold gazes on a work divine,
A blending of all beauties; streams
and dells,
Fruit, foliage, crag, wood, corn-field,
mountain, vine,
And chiefless castles breathing
stern farewells
From grey but leafy walls, where Ruin greenly dwells.
And there they stand, as stands
a lofty mind,
Worn, but unstooping to the baser
crowd,
All tenantless, save to the crannying
wind,
Or holding dark communion with the
cloud.
There was a day when they were young
and proud,
Banners on high, and battles passed
below;
But they who fought are in a bloody
shroud,
And those which waved are shredless
dust ere now,
And the bleak battlements shall bear no future blow.
Beneath these battlements, within
those walls,
Power dwelt amidst her passions;
in proud state
Each robber chief upheld his armed
halls,
Doing his evil will, nor less elate
Than mightier heroes of a longer
date.
What want these outlaws conquerors
should have
But History’s purchased page
to call them great?
A wider space, an ornamented grave?
Their hopes were not less warm, their souls were full
as brave.
In their baronial feuds and single
fields,
What deeds of prowess unrecorded
died!
And Love, which lent a blazon to
their shields,
With emblems well devised by amorous
pride,
Through all the mail of iron hearts
would glide;
But still their flame was fierceness,
and drew on
Keen contest and destruction near
allied,
And many a tower for some fair mischief
won,
Saw the discoloured Rhine beneath its ruin run.
But thou, exulting and abounding
river!
Making thy waves a blessing as they
flow
Through banks whose beauty would
endure for ever,
Could man but leave thy bright creation
so,
Nor its fair promise from the surface
mow
With the sharp scythe of conflict,—then
to see
Thy valley of sweet waters, were
to know
Earth paved like Heaven; and to
seem such to me
Even now what wants thy stream?—that it
should Lethe be.
A thousand battles have assailed
thy banks,
But these and half their fame have
passed away,
And Slaughter heaped on high his
weltering ranks:
Their very graves are gone, and
what are they?
Thy tide washed down the blood of
yesterday,
And all was stainless, and on thy
clear stream
Glassed with its dancing light the
sunny ray;
But o’er the blackened memory’s
blighting dream
Thy waves would vainly roll, all sweeping as they
seem.
Thus Harold inly said, and passed
along,
Yet not insensible to all which
here
Awoke the jocund birds to early
song
In glens which might have made e’en
exile dear:
Though on his brow were graven lines
austere,
And tranquil sternness which had
ta’en the place
Of feelings fierier far but less
severe,
Joy was not always absent from his
face,
But o’er it in such scenes would steal with
transient trace.
Nor was all love shut from him,
though his days
Of passion had consumed themselves
to dust.
It is in vain that we would coldly
gaze
On such as smile upon us; the heart
must
Leap kindly back to kindness, though
disgust
Hath weaned it from all worldlings:
thus he felt,
For there was soft remembrance,
and sweet trust
In one fond breast, to which his
own would melt,
And in its tenderer hour on that his bosom dwelt.
And he had learned to love,—I
know not why,
For this in such as him seems strange
of mood, —
The helpless looks of blooming infancy,
Even in its earliest nurture; what
subdued,
To change like this, a mind so far
imbued
With scorn of man, it little boots
to know;
But thus it was; and though in solitude
Small power the nipped affections
have to grow,
In him this glowed when all beside had ceased to glow.
And there was one soft breast, as
hath been said,
Which unto his was bound by stronger
ties
Than the church links withal; and,
though unwed,
that love was pure, and, far above
disguise,
Had stood the test of mortal enmities
Still undivided, and cemented more
By peril, dreaded most in female
eyes;
But this was firm, and from a foreign
shore
Well to that heart might his these absent greetings
pour!
The castled crag of Drachenfels
Frowns o’er the wide and winding
Rhine.
Whose breast of waters broadly swells
Between the banks which bear the
vine,
And hills all rich with blossomed
trees,
And fields which promise corn and
wine,
And scattered cities crowning these,
Whose far white walls along them
shine,
Have strewed a scene, which I should
see
With double joy wert thou with
me!
And peasant girls, with deep blue
eyes,
And hands which offer early flowers,
Walk smiling o’er this paradise;
Above, the frequent feudal towers
Through green leaves lift their
walls of grey,
And many a rock which steeply lours,
And noble arch in proud decay,
Look o’er this vale of vintage
bowers:
But one thing want these banks of
Rhine, —
Thy gentle hand to clasp in mine!
I send the lilies given to me;
Though long before thy hand they
touch,
I know that they must withered be,
But yet reject them not as such;
For I have cherished them as dear,
Because they yet may meet thine
eye,
And guide thy soul to mine e’en
here,
When thou behold’st them drooping
nigh,
And know’st them gathered
by the Rhine,
And offered from my heart to thine!
The river nobly foams and flows,
The charm of this enchanted ground,
And all its thousand turns disclose
Some fresher beauty varying round;
The haughtiest breast its wish might
bound
Through life to dwell delighted
here;
Nor could on earth a spot be found
To Nature and to me so dear,
Could thy dear eyes in following
mine
Still sweeten more these banks of
Rhine!
By Coblentz, on a rise of gentle
ground,
There is a small and simple pyramid,
Crowning the summit of the verdant
mound;
Beneath its base are heroes’
ashes hid,
Our enemy’s,—but
let not that forbid
Honour to Marceau! o’er whose
early tomb
Tears, big tears, gushed from the
rough soldier’s lid,
Lamenting and yet envying such a
doom,
Falling for France, whose rights he battled to resume.
Brief, brave, and glorious was his
young career, —
His mourners were two hosts, his
friends and foes;
And fitly may the stranger lingering
here
Pray for his gallant spirit’s
bright repose;
For he was Freedom’s champion,
one of those,
The few in number, who had not o’erstept
The charter to chastise which she
bestows
On such as wield her weapons; he
had kept
The whiteness of his soul, and thus men o’er
him wept.
Here Ehrenbreitstein, with her shattered
wall
Black with the miner’s blast,
upon her height
Yet shows of what she was, when
shell and ball
Rebounding idly on her strength
did light;
A tower of victory! from whence
the flight
Of baffled foes was watched along
the plain;
But Peace destroyed what War could
never blight,
And laid those proud roofs bare
to Summer’s rain —
On which the iron shower for years had poured in vain.
Adieu to thee, fair Rhine!
How long, delighted,
The stranger fain would linger on
his way;
Thine is a scene alike where souls
united
Or lonely Contemplation thus might
stray;
And could the ceaseless vultures
cease to prey
On self-condemning bosoms, it were
here,
Where Nature, not too sombre nor
too gay,
Wild but not rude, awful yet not
austere,
Is to the mellow earth as autumn to the year.
Adieu to thee again! a vain adieu!
There can be no farewell to scene
like thine;
The mind is coloured by thy every
hue;
And if reluctantly the eyes resign
Their cherished gaze upon thee,
lovely Rhine!
’Tis with the thankful glance
of parting praise;
More mighty spots may rise—more
glaring shine,
But none unite in one attaching
maze
The brilliant, fair, and soft;—the glories
of old days.
The negligently grand, the fruitful
bloom
Of coming ripeness, the white city’s
sheen,
The rolling stream, the precipice’s
gloom,
The forest’s growth, and Gothic
walls between,
The wild rocks shaped as they had
turrets been
In mockery of man’s art; and
these withal
A race of faces happy as the scene,
Whose fertile bounties here extend
to all,
Still springing o’er thy banks, though empires
near them fall.
But these recede. Above me
are the Alps,
The palaces of Nature, whose vast
walls
Have pinnacled in clouds their snowy
scalps,
And throned Eternity in icy halls
Of cold sublimity, where forms and
falls
The avalanche—the thunderbolt
of snow!
All that expands the spirit, yet
appals,
Gathers around these summits, as
to show
How Earth may pierce to Heaven, yet leave vain man
below.
But ere these matchless heights
I dare to scan,
There is a spot should not be passed
in vain, —
Morat! the proud, the patriot field!
where man
May gaze on ghastly trophies of
the slain,
Nor blush for those who conquered
on that plain;
Here Burgundy bequeathed his tombless
host,
A bony heap, through ages to remain,
Themselves their monument;—the
Stygian coast
Unsepulchred they roamed, and shrieked each wandering
ghost.
While Waterloo with Cannae’s
carnage vies,
Morat and Marathon twin names shall
stand;
They were true Glory’s stainless
victories,
Won by the unambitious heart and
hand
Of a proud, brotherly, and civic
band,
All unbought champions in no princely
cause
Of vice-entailed Corruption; they
no land
Doomed to bewail the blasphemy of
laws
Making king’s rights divine, by some Draconic
clause.
By a lone wall a lonelier column
rears
A grey and grief-worn aspect of
old days
’Tis the last remnant of the
wreck of years,
And looks as with the wild bewildered
gaze
Of one to stone converted by amaze,
Yet still with consciousness; and
there it stands,
Making a marvel that it not decays,
When the coeval pride of human hands,
Levelled Aventicum, hath strewed her subject lands.
And there—oh! sweet and
sacred be the name! —
Julia—the daughter, the
devoted—gave
Her youth to Heaven; her heart,
beneath a claim
Nearest to Heaven’s, broke
o’er a father’s grave.
Justice is sworn ’gainst tears,
and hers would crave
The life she lived in; but the judge
was just,
And then she died on him she could
not save.
Their tomb was simple, and without
a bust,
And held within their urn one mind, one heart, one
dust.
But these are deeds which should
not pass away,
And names that must not wither,
though the earth
Forgets her empires with a just
decay,
The enslavers and the enslaved,
their death and birth;
The high, the mountain-majesty of
worth,
Should be, and shall, survivor of
its woe,
And from its immortality look forth
In the sun’s face, like yonder
Alpine snow,
Imperishably pure beyond all things below.
Lake Leman woos me with its crystal
face,
The mirror where the stars and mountains
view
The stillness of their aspect in
each trace
Its clear depth yields of their
far height and hue:
There is too much of man here, to
look through
With a fit mind the might which
I behold;
But soon in me shall Loneliness
renew
Thoughts hid, but not less cherished
than of old,
Ere mingling with the herd had penned me in their
fold.
To fly from, need not be to hate,
mankind;
All are not fit with them to stir
and toil,
Nor is it discontent to keep the
mind
Deep in its fountain, lest it overboil
In one hot throng, where we become
the spoil
Of our infection, till too late
and long
We may deplore and struggle with
the coil,
In wretched interchange of wrong
for wrong
Midst a contentious world, striving where none are
strong.
There, in a moment, we may plunge
our years
In fatal penitence, and in the blight
Of our own soul, turn all our blood
to tears,
And colour things to come with hues
of Night;
The race of life becomes a hopeless
flight
To those that walk in darkness:
on the sea,
The boldest steer but where their
ports invite,
But there are wanderers o’er
Eternity
Whose bark drives on and on, and anchored ne’er
shall be.
Is it not better, then, to be alone,
And love Earth only for its earthly
sake?
By the blue rushing of the arrowy
Rhone,
Or the pure bosom of its nursing
lake,
Which feeds it as a mother who doth
make
A fair but froward infant her own
care,
Kissing its cries away as these
awake; —
Is it not better thus our lives
to wear,
Than join the crushing crowd, doomed to inflict or
bear?
I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me; and to
me,
High mountains are a feeling, but
the hum
Of human cities torture: I
can see
Nothing to loathe in Nature, save
to be
A link reluctant in a fleshly chain,
Classed among creatures, when the
soul can flee,
And with the sky, the peak, the
heaving plain
Of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain.
And thus I am absorbed, and this
is life:
I look upon the peopled desert Past,
As on a place of agony and strife,
Where, for some sin, to Sorrow I
was cast,
To act and suffer, but remount at
last
With a fresh pinion; which I felt
to spring,
Though young, yet waxing vigorous
as the blast
Which it would cope with, on delighted
wing,
Spurning the clay-cold bonds which round our being
cling.
And when, at length, the mind shall
be all free
From what it hates in this degraded
form,
Reft of its carnal life, save what
shall be
Existent happier in the fly and
worm, —
When elements to elements conform,
And dust is as it should be, shall
I not
Feel all I see, less dazzling, but
more warm?
The bodiless thought? the Spirit
of each spot?
Of which, even now, I share at times the immortal
lot?
Are not the mountains, waves, and
skies a part
Of me and of my soul, as I of them?
Is not the love of these deep in
my heart
With a pure passion? should I not
contemn
All objects, if compared with these?
and stem
A tide of suffering, rather than
forego
Such feelings for the hard and worldly
phlegm
Of those whose eyes are only turned
below,
Gazing upon the ground, with thoughts which dare not
glow?
But this is not my theme; and I
return
To that which is immediate, and
require
Those who find contemplation in
the urn,
To look on One whose dust was once
all fire,
A native of the land where I respire
The clear air for awhile—a
passing guest,
Where he became a being,—whose
desire
Was to be glorious; ’twas
a foolish quest,
The which to gain and keep he sacrificed all rest.
Here the self-torturing sophist,
wild Rousseau,
The apostle of affliction, he who
threw
Enchantment over passion, and from
woe
Wrung overwhelming eloquence, first
drew
The breath which made him wretched;
yet he knew
How to make madness beautiful, and
cast
O’er erring deeds and thoughts
a heavenly hue
Of words, like sunbeams, dazzling
as they past
The eyes, which o’er them shed tears feelingly
and fast.
His love was passion’s essence—as
a tree
On fire by lightning; with ethereal
flame
Kindled he was, and blasted; for
to be
Thus, and enamoured, were in him
the same.
But his was not the love of living
dame,
Nor of the dead who rise upon our
dreams,
But of Ideal beauty, which became
In him existence, and o’erflowing
teems
Along his burning page, distempered though it seems.
This breathed itself to life
in Julie, this
Invested her with all that’s
wild and sweet;
This hallowed, too, the memorable
kiss
Which every morn his fevered lip
would greet,
From hers, who but with friendship
his would meet:
But to that gentle touch, through
brain and breast
Flashed the thrilled spirit’s
love-devouring heat;
In that absorbing sigh perchance
more blest,
Than vulgar minds may be with all they seek possest.
His life was one long war with self-sought
foes,
Or friends by him self-banished;
for his mind
Had grown Suspicion’s sanctuary,
and chose
For its own cruel sacrifice, the
kind,
’Gainst whom he raged with
fury strange and blind.
But he was frenzied,—wherefore,
who may know?
Since cause might be which skill
could never find;
But he was frenzied by disease or
woe
To that worst pitch of all, which wears a reasoning
show.
For then he was inspired, and from
him came,
As from the Pythian’s mystic
cave of yore,
Those oracles which set the world
in flame,
Nor ceased to burn till kingdoms
were no more:
Did he not this for France, which
lay before
Bowed to the inborn tyranny of years?
Broken and trembling to the yoke
she bore,
Till by the voice of him and his
compeers
Roused up to too much wrath, which follows o’ergrown
fears?
They made themselves a fearful monument!
The wreck of old opinions—things
which grew,
Breathed from the birth of time:
the veil they rent,
And what behind it lay, all earth
shall view.
But good with ill they also overthrew,
Leaving but ruins, wherewith to
rebuild
Upon the same foundation, and renew
Dungeons and thrones, which the
same hour refilled,
As heretofore, because ambition was self-willed.
But this will not endure, nor be
endured!
Mankind have felt their strength,
and made it felt.
They might have used it better,
but, allured
By their new vigour, sternly have
they dealt
On one another; Pity ceased to melt
With her once natural charities.
But they,
Who in Oppression’s darkness
caved had dwelt,
They were not eagles, nourished
with the day;
What marvel then, at times, if they mistook their
prey?
What deep wounds ever closed without
a scar?
The heart’s bleed longest,
and but heal to wear
That which disfigures it; and they
who war
With their own hopes, and have been
vanquished, bear
Silence, but not submission:
in his lair
Fixed Passion holds his breath,
until the hour
Which shall atone for years; none
need despair:
It came, it cometh, and will come,—the
power
To punish or forgive—in one we shall
be slower.
Clear, placid Leman! thy contrasted
lake,
With the wild world I dwelt in,
is a thing
Which warns me, with its stillness,
to forsake
Earth’s troubled waters for
a purer spring.
This quiet sail is as a noiseless
wing
To waft me from distraction; once
I loved
Torn ocean’s roar, but thy
soft murmuring
Sounds sweet as if a sister’s
voice reproved,
That I with stern delights should e’er have
been so moved.
It is the hush of night, and all
between
Thy margin and the mountains, dusk,
yet clear,
Mellowed and mingling, yet distinctly
seen.
Save darkened Jura, whose capt heights
appear
Precipitously steep; and drawing
near,
There breathes a living fragrance
from the shore,
Of flowers yet fresh with childhood;
on the ear
Drops the light drip of the suspended
oar,
Or chirps the grasshopper one good-night carol more;
He is an evening reveller, who makes
His life an infancy, and sings his
fill;
At intervals, some bird from out
the brakes
Starts into voice a moment, then
is still.
There seems a floating whisper on
the hill,
But that is fancy, for the starlight
dews
All silently their tears of love
instil,
Weeping themselves away, till they
infuse
Deep into Nature’s breast the spirit of her
hues.
Ye stars! which are the poetry of
heaven,
If in your bright leaves we would
read the fate
Of men and empires,—’tis
to be forgiven,
That in our aspirations to be great,
Our destinies o’erleap their
mortal state,
And claim a kindred with you; for
ye are
A beauty and a mystery, and create
In us such love and reverence from
afar,
That fortune, fame, power, life, have named themselves
a star.
All heaven and earth are still—though
not in sleep,
But breathless, as we grow when
feeling most;
And silent, as we stand in thoughts
too deep: —
All heaven and earth are still:
from the high host
Of stars, to the lulled lake and
mountain-coast,
All is concentered in a life intense,
Where not a beam, nor air, nor leaf
is lost,
But hath a part of being, and a
sense
Of that which is of all Creator and defence.
Then stirs the feeling infinite,
so felt
In solitude, where we are least
alone;
A truth, which through our being
then doth melt,
And purifies from self: it
is a tone,
The soul and source of music, which
makes known
Eternal harmony, and sheds a charm,
Like to the fabled Cytherea’s
zone,
Binding all things with beauty;—’twould
disarm
The spectre Death, had he substantial power to harm.
Nor vainly did the early Persian
make
His altar the high places and the
peak
Of earth-o’ergazing mountains,
and thus take
A fit and unwalled temple, there
to seek
The Spirit, in whose honour shrines
are weak,
Upreared of human hands. Come,
and compare
Columns and idol-dwellings, Goth
or Greek,
With Nature’s realms of worship,
earth and air,
Nor fix on fond abodes to circumscribe thy prayer!
The sky is changed!—and
such a change! O night,
And storm, and darkness, ye are
wondrous strong,
Yet lovely in your strength, as
is the light
Of a dark eye in woman! Far
along,
From peak to peak, the rattling
crags among,
Leaps the live thunder! Not
from one lone cloud,
But every mountain now hath found
a tongue;
And Jura answers, through her misty
shroud,
Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud!
And this is in the night: —Most
glorious night!
Thou wert not sent for slumber!
let me be
A sharer in thy fierce and far delight
—
A portion of the tempest and of
thee!
How the lit lake shines, a phosphoric
sea,
And the big rain comes dancing to
the earth!
And now again ’tis black,—and
now, the glee
Of the loud hills shakes with its
mountain-mirth,
As if they did rejoice o’er a young earthquake’s
birth.
Now, where the swift Rhone cleaves
his way between
Heights which appear as lovers who
have parted
In hate, whose mining depths so
intervene,
That they can meet no more, though
broken-hearted;
Though in their souls, which thus
each other thwarted,
Love was the very root of the fond
rage
Which blighted their life’s
bloom, and then departed:
Itself expired, but leaving them
an age
Of years all winters—war within themselves
to wage.
Now, where the quick Rhone thus
hath cleft his way,
The mightiest of the storms hath
ta’en his stand;
For here, not one, but many, make
their play,
And fling their thunderbolts from
hand to hand,
Flashing and cast around:
of all the band,
The brightest through these parted
hills hath forked
His lightnings, as if he did understand
That in such gaps as desolation
worked,
There the hot shaft should blast whatever therein
lurked.
Sky, mountains, river, winds, lake,
lightnings! ye,
With night, and clouds, and thunder,
and a soul
To make these felt and feeling,
well may be
Things that have made me watchful;
the far roll
Of your departing voices, is the
knoll
Of what in me is sleepless,—if
I rest.
But where of ye, O tempests! is
the goal?
Are ye like those within the human
breast?
Or do ye find at length, like eagles, some high nest?
Could I embody and unbosom now
That which is most within me,—could
I wreak
My thoughts upon expression, and
thus throw
Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings,
strong or weak,
All that I would have sought, and
all I seek,
Bear, know, feel, and yet breathe—into
one word,
And that one word were lightning,
I would speak;
But as it is, I live and die unheard,
With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword.
The morn is up again, the dewy morn,
With breath all incense, and with
cheek all bloom,
Laughing the clouds away with playful
scorn,
And living as if earth contained
no tomb, —
And glowing into day: we may
resume
The march of our existence:
and thus I,
Still on thy shores, fair Leman!
may find room
And food for meditation, nor pass
by
Much, that may give us pause, if pondered fittingly.
Clarens! sweet Clarens! birthplace
of deep Love!
Thine air is the young breath of
passionate thought;
Thy trees take root in love; the
snows above
The very glaciers have his colours
caught,
And sunset into rose-hues sees them
wrought
By rays which sleep there lovingly:
the rocks,
The permanent crags, tell here of
Love, who sought
In them a refuge from the worldly
shocks,
Which stir and sting the soul with hope that woos,
then mocks.
Clarens! by heavenly feet thy paths
are trod, —
Undying Love’s, who here ascends
a throne
To which the steps are mountains;
where the god
Is a pervading life and light,—so
shown
Not on those summits solely, nor
alone
In the still cave and forest; o’er
the flower
His eye is sparkling, and his breath
hath blown,
His soft and summer breath, whose
tender power
Passes the strength of storms in their most desolate
hour.
All things are here of him;
from the black pines,
Which are his shade on high, and
the loud roar
Of torrents, where he listeneth,
to the vines
Which slope his green path downward
to the shore,
Where the bowed waters meet him,
and adore,
Kissing his feet with murmurs; and
the wood,
The covert of old trees, with trunks
all hoar,
But light leaves, young as joy,
stands where it stood,
Offering to him, and his, a populous solitude.
A populous solitude of bees and
birds,
And fairy-formed and many coloured
things,
Who worship him with notes more
sweet than words,
And innocently open their glad wings,
Fearless and full of life:
the gush of springs,
And fall of lofty fountains, and
the bend
Of stirring branches, and the bud
which brings
The swiftest thought of beauty,
here extend,
Mingling, and made by Love, unto one mighty end.
He who hath loved not, here would
learn that lore,
And make his heart a spirit:
he who knows
That tender mystery, will love the
more,
For this is Love’s recess,
where vain men’s woes,
And the world’s waste, have
driven him far from those,
For ’tis his nature to advance
or die;
He stands not still, but or decays,
or grows
Into a boundless blessing, which
may vie
With the immortal lights, in its eternity!
’Twas not for fiction chose
Rousseau this spot,
Peopling it with affections; but
he found
It was the scene which passion must
allot
To the mind’s purified beings;
’twas the ground
Where early Love his Psyche’s
zone unbound,
And hallowed it with loveliness:
’tis lone,
And wonderful, and deep, and hath
a sound,
And sense, and sight of sweetness;
here the Rhone
Hath spread himself a couch, the Alps have reared
a throne.
Lausanne! and Ferney! ye have been
the abodes
Of names which unto you bequeathed
a name;
Mortals, who sought and found, by
dangerous roads,
A path to perpetuity of fame:
They were gigantic minds, and their
steep aim
Was, Titan-like, on daring doubts
to pile
Thoughts which should call down
thunder, and the flame
Of Heaven, again assailed, if Heaven
the while
On man and man’s research could deign do more
than smile.
The one was fire and fickleness,
a child
Most mutable in wishes, but in mind
A wit as various,—gay,
grave, sage, or wild, —
Historian, bard, philosopher combined:
He multiplied himself among mankind,
The Proteus of their talents:
But his own
Breathed most in ridicule,—which,
as the wind,
Blew where it listed, laying all
things prone, —
Now to o’erthrow a fool, and now to shake a
throne.
The other, deep and slow, exhausting
thought,
And hiving wisdom with each studious
year,
In meditation dwelt, with learning
wrought,
And shaped his weapon with an edge
severe,
Sapping a solemn creed with solemn
sneer;
The lord of irony,—that
master spell,
Which stung his foes to wrath, which
grew from fear,
And doomed him to the zealot’s
ready hell,
Which answers to all doubts so eloquently well.
Yet, peace be with their ashes,—for
by them,
If merited, the penalty is paid;
It is not ours to judge, far less
condemn;
The hour must come when such things
shall be made
Known unto all,—or hope
and dread allayed
By slumber on one pillow, in the
dust,
Which, thus much we are sure, must
lie decayed;
And when it shall revive, as is
our trust,
’Twill be to be forgiven, or suffer what is
just.
But let me quit man’s works,
again to read
His Maker’s spread around
me, and suspend
This page, which from my reveries
I feed,
Until it seems prolonging without
end.
The clouds above me to the white
Alps tend,
And I must pierce them, and survey
whate’er
May be permitted, as my steps I
bend
To their most great and growing
region, where
The earth to her embrace compels the powers of air.
Italia! too, Italia! looking on
thee
Full flashes on the soul the light
of ages,
Since the fierce Carthaginian almost
won thee,
To the last halo of the chiefs and
sages
Who glorify thy consecrated pages;
Thou wert the throne and grave of
empires; still,
The fount at which the panting mind
assuages
Her thirst of knowledge, quaffing
there her fill,
Flows from the eternal source of Rome’s imperial
hill.
Thus far have I proceeded in a theme
Renewed with no kind auspices:
—to feel
We are not what we have been, and
to deem
We are not what we should be, and
to steel
The heart against itself; and to
conceal,
With a proud caution, love or hate,
or aught, —
Passion or feeling, purpose, grief,
or zeal, —
Which is the tyrant spirit of our
thought,
Is a stern task of soul: —No matter,—it
is taught.
And for these words, thus woven
into song,
It may be that they are a harmless
wile, —
The colouring of the scenes which
fleet along,
Which I would seize, in passing,
to beguile
My breast, or that of others, for
a while.
Fame is the thirst of youth,—but
I am not
So young as to regard men’s
frown or smile
As loss or guerdon of a glorious
lot;
I stood and stand alone,—remembered or
forgot.
I have not loved the world, nor
the world me;
I have not flattered its rank breath,
nor bowed
To its idolatries a patient knee,
—
Nor coined my cheek to smiles, nor
cried aloud
In worship of an echo; in the crowd
They could not deem me one of such;
I stood
Among them, but not of them; in
a shroud
Of thoughts which were not their
thoughts, and still could,
Had I not filed my mind, which thus itself subdued.
I have not loved the world, nor
the world me, —
But let us part fair foes; I do
believe,
Though I have found them not, that
there may be
Words which are things,—hopes
which will not deceive,
And virtues which are merciful,
nor weave
Snares for the falling: I
would also deem
O’er others’ griefs
that some sincerely grieve;
That two, or one, are almost what
they seem, —
That goodness is no name, and happiness no dream.
My daughter! with thy name this
song begun —
My daughter! with thy name this
much shall end —
I see thee not, I hear thee not,—but
none
Can be so wrapt in thee; thou art
the friend
To whom the shadows of far years
extend:
Albeit my brow thou never shouldst
behold,
My voice shall with thy future visions
blend,
And reach into thy heart, when mine
is cold, —
A token and a tone, even from thy father’s mould.
To aid thy mind’s development,—to
watch
Thy dawn of little joys,—to
sit and see
Almost thy very growth,—to
view thee catch
Knowledge of objects, wonders yet
to thee!
To hold thee lightly on a gentle
knee,
And print on thy soft cheek a parent’s
kiss, —
This, it should seem, was not reserved
for me
Yet this was in my nature:
—As it is,
I know not what is there, yet something like to this.
Yet, though dull Hate as duty should
be taught,
I know that thou wilt love me; though
my name
Should be shut from thee, as a spell
still fraught
With desolation, and a broken claim:
Though the grave closed between
us,—’twere the same,
I know that thou wilt love me:
though to drain
my blood from out thy being were
an aim,
And an attainment,—all
would be in vain, —
Still thou wouldst love me, still that more than life
retain.
The child of love,—though
born in bitterness,
And nurtured in convulsion.
Of thy sire
These were the elements, and thine
no less.
As yet such are around thee; but
thy fire
Shall be more tempered, and thy
hope far higher.
Sweet be thy cradled slumbers!
O’er the sea,
And from the mountains where I now
respire,
Fain would I waft such blessing
upon thee,
As, with a sigh, I deem thou mightst have been to
me!
CANTO THE FOURTH.
I stood in Venice, on the Bridge
of Sighs;
A palace and a prison on each hand:
I saw from out the wave her structures
rise
As from the stroke of the enchanter’s
wand:
A thousand years their cloudy wings
expand
Around me, and a dying glory smiles
O’er the far times when many
a subject land
Looked to the winged Lion’s
marble piles,
Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred
isles!
She looks a sea Cybele, fresh from
ocean,
Rising with her tiara of proud towers
At airy distance, with majestic
motion,
A ruler of the waters and their
powers:
And such she was; her daughters
had their dowers
From spoils of nations, and the
exhaustless East
Poured in her lap all gems in sparkling
showers.
In purple was she robed, and of
her feast
Monarchs partook, and deemed their dignity increased.
In Venice, Tasso’s echoes
are no more,
And silent rows the songless gondolier;
Her palaces are crumbling to the
shore,
And music meets not always now the
ear:
Those days are gone—but
beauty still is here.
States fall, arts fade—but
Nature doth not die,
Nor yet forget how Venice once was
dear,
The pleasant place of all festivity,
The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy!
But unto us she hath a spell beyond
Her name in story, and her long
array
Of mighty shadows, whose dim forms
despond
Above the dogeless city’s
vanished sway;
Ours is a trophy which will not
decay
With the Rialto; Shylock and the
Moor,
And Pierre, cannot be swept or worn
away —
The keystones of the arch! though
all were o’er,
For us repeopled were the solitary shore.
The beings of the mind are not of
clay;
Essentially immortal, they create
And multiply in us a brighter ray
And more beloved existence:
that which Fate
Prohibits to dull life, in this
our state
Of mortal bondage, by these spirits
supplied,
First exiles, then replaces what
we hate;
Watering the heart whose early flowers
have died,
And with a fresher growth replenishing the void.
Such is the refuge of our youth
and age,
The first from Hope, the last from
Vacancy;
And this worn feeling peoples many
a page,
And, may be, that which grows beneath
mine eye:
Yet there are things whose strong
reality
Outshines our fairy-land; in shape
and hues
More beautiful than our fantastic
sky,
And the strange constellations which
the Muse
O’er her wild universe is skilful to diffuse:
I saw or dreamed of such,—but
let them go —
They came like truth, and disappeared
like dreams;
And whatsoe’er they were—are
now but so;
I could replace them if I would:
still teems
My mind with many a form which aptly
seems
Such as I sought for, and at moments
found;
Let these too go—for
waking reason deems
Such overweening phantasies unsound,
And other voices speak, and other sights surround.
I’ve taught me other tongues,
and in strange eyes
Have made me not a stranger; to
the mind
Which is itself, no changes bring
surprise;
Nor is it harsh to make, nor hard
to find
A country with—ay, or
without mankind;
Yet was I born where men are proud
to be,
Not without cause; and should I
leave behind
The inviolate island of the sage
and free,
And seek me out a home by a remoter sea,
Perhaps I loved it well: and
should I lay
My ashes in a soil which is not
mine,
My spirit shall resume it—if
we may
Unbodied choose a sanctuary.
I twine
My hopes of being remembered in
my line
With my land’s language:
if too fond and far
These aspirations in their scope
incline, —
If my fame should be, as my fortunes
are,
Of hasty growth and blight, and dull Oblivion bar.
My name from out the temple where
the dead
Are honoured by the nations—let
it be —
And light the laurels on a loftier
head!
And be the Spartan’s epitaph
on me —
‘Sparta hath many a worthier
son than he.’
Meantime I seek no sympathies, nor
need;
The thorns which I have reaped are
of the tree
I planted,—they have
torn me, and I bleed:
I should have known what fruit would spring from such
a seed.
The spouseless Adriatic mourns her
lord;
And, annual marriage now no more
renewed,
The Bucentaur lies rotting unrestored,
Neglected garment of her widowhood!
St. Mark yet sees his lion where
he stood
Stand, but in mockery of his withered
power,
Over the proud place where an Emperor
sued,
And monarchs gazed and envied in
the hour
When Venice was a queen with an unequalled dower.
The Suabian sued, and now the Austrian
reigns —
An Emperor tramples where an Emperor
knelt;
Kingdoms are shrunk to provinces,
and chains
Clank over sceptred cities; nations
melt
From power’s high pinnacle,
when they have felt
The sunshine for a while, and downward
go
Like lauwine loosened from the mountain’s
belt:
Oh for one hour of blind old Dandolo!
The octogenarian chief, Byzantium’s conquering
foe.
Before St. Mark still glow his steeds
of brass,
Their gilded collars glittering
in the sun;
But is not Doria’s menace
come to pass?
Are they not bridled?—Venice,
lost and won,
Her thirteen hundred years of freedom
done,
Sinks, like a seaweed, into whence
she rose!
Better be whelmed beneath the waves,
and shun,
Even in Destruction’s depth,
her foreign foes,
From whom submission wrings an infamous repose.
In youth she was all glory,—a
new Tyre, —
Her very byword sprung from victory,
The ‘Planter of the Lion,’
which through fire
And blood she bore o’er subject
earth and sea;
Though making many slaves, herself
still free
And Europe’s bulwark ’gainst
the Ottomite:
Witness Troy’s rival, Candia!
Vouch it, ye
Immortal waves that saw Lepanto’s
fight!
For ye are names no time nor tyranny can blight.
Statues of glass—all
shivered—the long file
Of her dead doges are declined to
dust;
But where they dwelt, the vast and
sumptuous pile
Bespeaks the pageant of their splendid
trust;
Their sceptre broken, and their
sword in rust,
Have yielded to the stranger:
empty halls,
Thin streets, and foreign aspects,
such as must
Too oft remind her who and what
enthrals,
Have flung a desolate cloud o’er Venice’
lovely walls.
When Athens’ armies fell at
Syracuse,
And fettered thousands bore the
yoke of war,
Redemption rose up in the Attic
Muse,
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,
And bids him thank the bard for freedom 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
And Otway, Radcliffe, Schiller,
Shakspeare’s art,
Had stamped her image in me, and
e’en so,
Although I found her thus, we did
not part,
Perchance e’en dearer in her
day of woe,
Than when she was a boast, a marvel, and a show.
I can repeople with the past—and
of
The present there is still for eye
and thought,
And meditation chastened down, enough;
And more, it may be, than I hoped
or sought;
And of the happiest moments which
were wrought
Within the web of my existence,
some
From thee, fair Venice! have their
colours caught:
There are some feelings Time cannot
benumb,
Nor torture shake, or mine would now be cold and dumb.
But from their nature will the tannen
grow
Loftiest on loftiest and least sheltered
rocks,
Rooted in barrenness, where nought
below
Of soil supports them ’gainst
the Alpine shocks
Of eddying storms; yet springs the
trunk, and mocks
The howling tempest, till its height
and frame
Are worthy of the mountains from
whose blocks
Of bleak, grey granite, into life
it came,
And grew a giant tree;—the mind may grow
the same.
Existence may be borne, and the
deep root
Of life and sufferance make its
firm abode
In bare and desolate bosoms:
mute
The camel labours with the heaviest
load,
And the wolf dies in silence.
Not bestowed
In vain should such examples be;
if they,
Things of ignoble or of savage mood,
Endure and shrink not, we of nobler
clay
May temper it to bear,—it is but for a
day.
All suffering doth destroy, or is
destroyed,
Even by the sufferer; and, in each
event,
Ends: —Some, with
hope replenished and rebuoyed,
Return to whence they came—with
like intent,
And weave their web again; some,
bowed and bent,
Wax grey and ghastly, withering
ere their time,
And perish with the reed on which
they leant;
Some seek devotion, toil, war, good
or crime,
According as their souls were formed to sink or climb.
But ever and anon of griefs subdued
There comes a token like a scorpion’s
sting,
Scarce seen, but with fresh bitterness
imbued;
And slight withal may be the things
which bring
Back on the heart the weight which
it would fling
Aside for ever: it may be
a sound —
A tone of music—summer’s
eve—or spring —
A flower—the wind—the
ocean—which shall wound,
Striking the electric chain wherewith we are darkly
bound.
And how and why we know not, nor
can trace
Home to its cloud this lightning
of the mind,
But feel the shock renewed, nor
can efface
The blight and blackening which
it leaves behind,
Which out of things familiar, undesigned,
When least we deem of such, calls
up to view
The spectres whom no exorcism can
bind, —
The cold—the changed—perchance
the dead—anew,
The mourned, the loved, the lost—too many!—yet
how few!
But my soul wanders; I demand it
back
To meditate amongst decay, and stand
A ruin amidst ruins; there to track
Fall’n states and buried greatness,
o’er a land
Which was the mightiest in
its old command,
And is the loveliest, and must
ever be
The master-mould of Nature’s
heavenly hand,
Wherein were cast the heroic and
the free,
The beautiful, the brave—the lords of earth
and sea.
The commonwealth of kings, the men
of Rome!
And even since, and now, fair Italy!
Thou art the garden of the world,
the home
Of all Art yields, and Nature can
decree;
Even in thy desert, what is like
to thee?
Thy very weeds are beautiful, thy
waste
More rich than other climes’
fertility;
Thy wreck a glory, and thy ruin
graced
With an immaculate charm which cannot be defaced.
The moon is up, and yet it is not
night —
Sunset divides the sky with her—a
sea
Of glory streams along the Alpine
height
Of blue Friuli’s mountains;
Heaven is free
From clouds, but of all colours
seems to be —
Melted to one vast Iris of the West,
Where the day joins the past eternity;
While, on the other hand, meek Dian’s
crest
Floats through the azure air—an island
of the blest!
A single star is at her side, and
reigns
With her o’er half the lovely
heaven; but still
Yon sunny sea heaves brightly, and
remains
Rolled o’er the peak of the
far Rhaetian hill,
As Day and Night contending were,
until
Nature reclaimed her order:
—gently flows
The deep-dyed Brenta, where their
hues instil
The odorous purple of a new-born
rose,
Which streams upon her stream, and glassed within
it glows,
Filled with the face of heaven,
which, from afar,
Comes down upon the waters; all
its hues,
From the rich sunset to the rising
star,
Their magical variety diffuse:
And now they change; a paler shadow
strews
Its mantle o’er the mountains;
parting day
Dies like the dolphin, whom each
pang imbues
With a new colour as it gasps away,
The last still loveliest, till—’tis
gone—and all is grey.
There is a tomb in Arqua;—reared
in air,
Pillared in their sarcophagus, repose
The bones of Laura’s lover:
here repair
Many familiar with his well-sung
woes,
The pilgrims of his genius.
He arose
To raise a language, and his land
reclaim
From the dull yoke of her barbaric
foes:
Watering the tree which bears his
lady’s name
With his melodious tears, he gave himself to fame.
They keep his dust in Arqua, where
he died;
The mountain-village where his latter
days
Went down the vale of years; and
’tis their pride —
An honest pride—and let
it be their praise,
To offer to the passing stranger’s
gaze
His mansion and his sepulchre; both
plain
And venerably simple, such as raise
A feeling more accordant with his
strain,
Than if a pyramid formed his monumental fane.
And the soft quiet hamlet where
he dwelt
Is one of that complexion which
seems made
For those who their mortality have
felt,
And sought a refuge from their hopes
decayed
In the deep umbrage of a green hill’s
shade,
Which shows a distant prospect far
away
Of busy cities, now in vain displayed,
For they can lure no further; and
the ray
Of a bright sun can make sufficient holiday.
Developing the mountains, leaves,
and flowers
And shining in the brawling brook,
where-by,
Clear as its current, glide the
sauntering hours
With a calm languor, which, though
to the eye
Idlesse it seem, hath its morality,
If from society we learn to live,
’Tis solitude should teach
us how to die;
It hath no flatterers; vanity can
give
No hollow aid; alone—man with his God must
strive:
Or, it may be, with demons, who
impair
The strength of better thoughts,
and seek their prey
In melancholy bosoms, such as were
Of moody texture from their earliest
day,
And loved to dwell in darkness and
dismay,
Deeming themselves predestined to
a doom
Which is not of the pangs that pass
away;
Making the sun like blood, the earth
a tomb,
The tomb a hell, and hell itself a murkier gloom.
Ferrara! in thy wide and grass-grown
streets,
Whose symmetry was not for solitude,
There seems as ’twere a curse
upon the seat’s
Of former sovereigns, and the antique
brood
Of Este, which for many an age made
good
Its strength within thy walls, and
was of yore
Patron or tyrant, as the changing
mood
Of petty power impelled, of those
who wore
The wreath which Dante’s brow alone had worn
before.
And Tasso is their glory and their
shame.
Hark to his strain! and then survey
his cell!
And see how dearly earned Torquato’s
fame,
And where Alfonso bade his poet
dwell.
The miserable despot could not quell
The insulted mind he sought to quench,
and blend
With the surrounding maniacs, in
the hell
Where he had plunged it. Glory
without end
Scattered the clouds away—and on that name
attend
The tears and praises of all time,
while thine
Would rot in its oblivion—in
the sink
Of worthless dust, which from thy
boasted line
Is shaken into nothing; but the
link
Thou formest in his fortunes bids
us think
Of thy poor malice, naming thee
with scorn —
Alfonso! how thy ducal pageants
shrink
From thee! if in another station
born,
Scarce fit to be the slave of him thou mad’st
to mourn:
Thou! formed to eat, and be
despised, and die,
Even as the beasts that perish,
save that thou
Hadst a more splendid trough, and
wider sty:
He! with a glory round his furrowed
brow,
Which emanated then, and dazzles
now
In face of all his foes, the Cruscan
quire,
And Boileau, whose rash envy could
allow
No strain which shamed his country’s
creaking lyre,
That whetstone of the teeth—monotony in
wire!
Peace to Torquato’s injured
shade! ’twas his
In life and death to be the mark
where Wrong
Aimed with their poisoned arrows—but
to miss.
Oh, victor unsurpassed in modern
song!
Each year brings forth its millions;
but how long
The tide of generations shall roll
on,
And not the whole combined and countless
throng
Compose a mind like thine?
Though all in one
Condensed their scattered rays, they would not form
a sun.
Great as thou art, yet paralleled
by those
Thy countrymen, before thee born
to shine,
The bards of Hell and Chivalry:
first rose
The Tuscan father’s comedy
divine;
Then, not unequal to the Florentine,
The Southern Scott, the minstrel
who called forth
A new creation with his magic line,
And, like the Ariosto of the North,
Sang ladye-love and war, romance and knightly worth.
The lightning rent from Ariosto’s
bust
The iron crown of laurel’s
mimicked leaves;
Nor was the ominous element unjust,
For the true laurel-wreath which
Glory weaves
Is of the tree no bolt of thunder
cleaves,
And the false semblance but disgraced
his brow;
Yet still, if fondly Superstition
grieves,
Know that the lightning sanctifies
below
Whate’er it strikes;—yon head is
doubly sacred now.
Italia! O Italia! thou who
hast
The fatal gift of beauty, which
became
A funeral dower of present woes
and past,
On thy sweet brow is sorrow ploughed
by shame,
And annals graved in characters
of flame.
Oh God! that thou wert in thy nakedness
Less lovely or more powerful, and
couldst claim
Thy right, and awe the robbers back,
who press
To shed thy blood, and drink the tears of thy distress;
Then mightst thou more appal; or,
less desired,
Be homely and be peaceful, undeplored
For thy destructive charms; then,
still untired,
Would not be seen the armed torrents
poured
Down the deep Alps; nor would the
hostile horde
Of many-nationed spoilers from the
Po
Quaff blood and water; nor the stranger’s
sword
Be thy sad weapon of defence, and
so,
Victor or vanquished, thou the slave of friend or
foe.
Wandering in youth, I traced the
path of him,
The Roman friend of Rome’s
least mortal mind,
The friend of Tully: as my
bark did skim
The bright blue waters with a fanning
wind,
Came Megara before me, and behind
AEgina lay, Piraeus on the right,
And Corinth on the left; I lay reclined
Along the prow, and saw all these
unite
In ruin, even as he had seen the desolate sight;
For time hath not rebuilt them,
but upreared
Barbaric dwellings on their shattered
site,
Which only make more mourned and
more endeared
The few last rays of their far-scattered
light,
And the crushed relics of their
vanished might.
The Roman saw these tombs in his
own age,
These sepulchres of cities, which
excite
Sad wonder, and his yet surviving
page
The moral lesson bears, drawn from such pilgrimage.
That page is now before me, and
on mine
his country’s ruin added to
the mass
Of perished states he mourned in
their decline,
And I in desolation: all that
was
Of then destruction is; and
now, alas!
Rome—Rome imperial, bows
her to the storm,
In the same dust and blackness,
and we pass
The skeleton of her Titanic form,
Wrecks of another world, whose ashes still are warm.
Yet, Italy! through every other
land
Thy wrongs should ring, and shall,
from side to side;
Mother of Arts! as once of Arms;
thy hand
Was then our Guardian, and is still
our guide;
Parent of our religion! whom the
wide
Nations have knelt to for the keys
of heaven!
Europe, repentant of her parricide,
Shall yet redeem thee, and, all
backward driven,
Roll the barbarian tide, and sue to be forgiven.
But Arno wins us to the fair white
walls,
Where the Etrurian Athens claims
and keeps
A softer feeling for her fairy halls.
Girt by her theatre of hills, she
reaps
Her corn, and wine, and oil, and
Plenty leaps
To laughing life, with her redundant
horn.
Along the banks where smiling Arno
sweeps,
Was modern Luxury of Commerce born,
And buried Learning rose, redeemed to a new morn.
There, too, the goddess loves in
stone, and fills
The air around with beauty; we inhale
The ambrosial aspect, which, beheld,
instils
Part of its immortality; the veil
Of heaven is half undrawn; within
the pale
We stand, and in that form and face
behold
What Mind can make, when Nature’s
self would fail;
And to the fond idolaters of old
Envy the innate flash which such a soul could mould:
We gaze and turn away, and know
not where,
Dazzled and drunk with beauty, till
the heart
Reels with its fulness; there—for
ever there —
Chained to the chariot of triumphal
Art,
We stand as captives, and would
not depart.
Away!—there need no words,
nor terms precise,
The paltry jargon of the marble
mart,
Where Pedantry gulls Folly—we
have eyes:
Blood, pulse, and breast, confirm the Dardan Shepherd’s
prize.
Appearedst thou not to Paris in
this guise?
Or to more deeply blest Anchises?
or,
In all thy perfect goddess-ship,
when lies
Before thee thy own vanquished Lord
of War?
And gazing in thy face as toward
a star,
Laid on thy lap, his eyes to thee
upturn,
Feeding on thy sweet cheek! while
thy lips are
With lava kisses melting while they
burn,
Showered on his eyelids, brow, and mouth, as from
an urn!
Glowing, and circumfused in speechless
love,
Their full divinity inadequate
That feeling to express, or to improve,
The gods become as mortals, and
man’s fate
Has moments like their brightest!
but the weight
Of earth recoils upon us;—let
it go!
We can recall such visions, and
create
From what has been, or might be,
things which grow,
Into thy statue’s form, and look like gods below.
I leave to learned fingers, and
wise hands,
The artist and his ape, to teach
and tell
How well his connoisseurship understands
The graceful bend, and the voluptuous
swell:
Let these describe the undescribable:
I would not their vile breath should
crisp the stream
Wherein that image shall for ever
dwell;
The unruffled mirror of the loveliest
dream
That ever left the sky on the deep soul to beam.
In Santa Croce’s holy precincts
lie
Ashes which make it holier, dust
which is
E’en in itself an immortality,
Though there were nothing save the
past, and this
The particle of those sublimities
Which have relapsed to chaos:
—here repose
Angelo’s, Alfieri’s
bones, and his,
The starry Galileo, with his woes;
Here Machiavelli’s earth returned to whence
it rose.
These are four minds, which, like
the elements,
Might furnish forth creation:
—Italy!
Time, which hath wronged thee with
ten thousand rents
Of thine imperial garment, shall
deny,
And hath denied, to every other
sky,
Spirits which soar from ruin:
—thy decay
Is still impregnate with divinity,
Which gilds it with revivifying
ray;
Such as the great of yore, Canova is to-day.
But where repose the all Etruscan
three —
Dante, and Petrarch, and, scarce
less than they,
The Bard of Prose, creative spirit!
he
Of the Hundred Tales of love—where
did they lay
Their bones, distinguished from
our common clay
In death as life? Are they
resolved to dust,
And have their country’s marbles
nought to say?
Could not her quarries furnish forth
one bust?
Did they not to her breast their filial earth entrust?
Ungrateful Florence! Dante
sleeps afar,
Like Scipio, buried by the upbraiding
shore;
Thy factions, in their worse than
civil war,
Proscribed the bard whose name for
evermore
Their children’s children
would in vain adore
With the remorse of ages; and the
crown
Which Petrarch’s laureate
brow supremely wore,
Upon a far and foreign soil had
grown,
His life, his fame, his grave, though rifled—not
thine own.
Boccaccio to his parent earth bequeathed
His dust,—and lies it
not her great among,
With many a sweet and solemn requiem
breathed
O’er him who formed the Tuscan’s
siren tongue?
That music in itself, whose sounds
are song,
The poetry of speech? No;—even
his tomb
Uptorn, must bear the hyaena bigots’
wrong,
No more amidst the meaner dead find
room,
Nor claim a passing sigh, because it told for whom?
And Santa Croce wants their mighty
dust;
Yet for this want more noted, as
of yore
The Caesar’s pageant, shorn
of Brutus’ bust,
Did but of Rome’s best son
remind her more:
Happier Ravenna! on thy hoary shore,
Fortress of falling empire! honoured
sleeps
The immortal exile;—Arqua,
too, her store
Of tuneful relics proudly claims
and keeps,
While Florence vainly begs her banished dead, and
weeps.
What is her pyramid of precious
stones?
Of porphyry, jasper, agate, and
all hues
Of gem and marble, to encrust the
bones
Of merchant-dukes? the momentary
dews
Which, sparkling to the twilight
stars, infuse
Freshness in the green turf that
wraps the dead,
Whose names are mausoleums of the
Muse,
Are gently prest with far more reverent
tread
Than ever paced the slab which paves the princely
head.
There be more things to greet the
heart and eyes
In Arno’s dome of Art’s
most princely shrine,
Where Sculpture with her rainbow
sister vies;
There be more marvels yet—but
not for mine;
For I have been accustomed to entwine
My thoughts with Nature rather in
the fields
Than Art in galleries: though
a work divine
Calls for my spirit’s homage,
yet it yields
Less than it feels, because the weapon which it wields
Is of another temper, and I roam
By Thrasimene’s lake, in the
defiles
Fatal to Roman rashness, more at
home;
For there the Carthaginian’s
warlike wiles
Come back before me, as his skill
beguiles
The host between the mountains and
the shore,
Where Courage falls in her despairing
files,
And torrents, swoll’n to rivers
with their gore,
Reek through the sultry plain, with legions scattered
o’er,
Like to a forest felled by mountain
winds;
And such the storm of battle on
this day,
And such the frenzy, whose convulsion
blinds
To all save carnage, that, beneath
the fray,
An earthquake reeled unheededly
away!
None felt stern Nature rocking at
his feet,
And yawning forth a grave for those
who lay
Upon their bucklers for a winding-sheet;
Such is the absorbing hate when warring nations meet.
The Earth to them was as a rolling
bark
Which bore them to Eternity; they
saw
The Ocean round, but had no time
to mark
The motions of their vessel:
Nature’s law,
In them suspended, recked not of
the awe
Which reigns when mountains tremble,
and the birds
Plunge in the clouds for refuge,
and withdraw
From their down-toppling nests;
and bellowing herds
Stumble o’er heaving plains, and man’s
dread hath no words.
Far other scene is Thrasimene now;
Her lake a sheet of silver, and
her plain
Rent by no ravage save the gentle
plough;
Her aged trees rise thick as once
the slain
Lay where their roots are; but a
brook hath ta’en —
A little rill of scanty stream and
bed —
A name of blood from that day’s
sanguine rain;
And Sanguinetto tells ye where the
dead
Made the earth wet, and turned the unwilling waters
red.
But thou, Clitumnus! in thy sweetest
wave
Of the most living crystal that
was e’er
The haunt of river nymph, to gaze
and lave
Her limbs where nothing hid them,
thou dost rear
Thy grassy banks whereon the milk-white
steer
Grazes; the purest god of gentle
waters!
And most serene of aspect, and most
clear:
Surely that stream was unprofaned
by slaughters,
A mirror and a bath for Beauty’s youngest daughters!
And on thy happy shore a temple
still,
Of small and delicate proportion,
keeps,
Upon a mild declivity of hill,
Its memory of thee; beneath it sweeps
Thy current’s calmness; oft
from out it leaps
The finny darter with the glittering
scales,
Who dwells and revels in thy glassy
deeps;
While, chance, some scattered water-lily
sails
Down where the shallower wave still tells its bubbling
tales.
Pass not unblest the genius of the
place!
If through the air a zephyr more
serene
Win to the brow, ’tis his;
and if ye trace
Along his margin a more eloquent
green,
If on the heart the freshness of
the scene
Sprinkle its coolness, and from
the dry dust
Of weary life a moment lave it clean
With Nature’s baptism,—’tis
to him ye must
Pay orisons for this suspension of disgust.
The roar of waters!—from
the headlong height
Velino cleaves the wave-worn precipice;
The fall of waters! rapid as the
light
The flashing mass foams shaking
the abyss;
The hell of waters! where they howl
and hiss,
And boil in endless torture; while
the sweat
Of their great agony, wrung out
from this
Their Phlegethon, curls round the
rocks of jet
That gird the gulf around, in pitiless horror set,
And mounts in spray the skies, and
thence again
Returns in an unceasing shower,
which round,
With its unemptied cloud of gentle
rain,
Is an eternal April to the ground,
Making it all one emerald.
How profound
The gulf! and how the giant element
From rock to rock leaps with delirious
bound,
Crushing the cliffs, which, downward
worn and rent
With his fierce footsteps, yield in chasms a fearful
vent
To the broad column which rolls
on, and shows
More like the fountain of an infant
sea
Torn from the womb of mountains
by the throes
Of a new world, than only thus to
be
Parent of rivers, which flow gushingly,
With many windings through the vale:
—Look back!
Lo! where it comes like an eternity,
As if to sweep down all things in
its track,
Charming the eye with dread,—a matchless
cataract,
Horribly beautiful! but on the verge,
From side to side, beneath the glittering
morn,
An Iris sits, amidst the infernal
surge,
Like Hope upon a deathbed, and,
unworn
Its steady dyes, while all around
is torn
By the distracted waters, bears
serene
Its brilliant hues with all their
beams unshorn:
Resembling, mid the torture of the
scene,
Love watching Madness with unalterable mien.
Once more upon the woody Apennine,
The infant Alps, which—had
I not before
Gazed on their mightier parents,
where the pine
Sits on more shaggy summits, and
where roar
The thundering lauwine—might
be worshipped more;
But I have seen the soaring Jungfrau
rear
Her never-trodden snow, and seen
the hoar
Glaciers of bleak Mont Blanc both
far and near,
And in Chimari heard the thunder-hills of fear,
The Acroceraunian mountains of old
name;
And on Parnassus seen the eagles
fly
Like spirits of the spot, as ’twere
for fame,
For still they soared unutterably
high:
I’ve looked on Ida with a
Trojan’s eye;
Athos, Olympus, AEtna, Atlas, made
These hills seem things of lesser
dignity,
All, save the lone Soracte’s
height displayed,
Not now in snow, which asks the lyric Roman’s
aid
For our remembrance, and from out
the plain
Heaves like a long-swept wave about
to break,
And on the curl hangs pausing:
not in vain
May he who will his recollections
rake,
And quote in classic raptures, and
awake
The hills with Latian echoes; I
abhorred
Too much, to conquer for the poet’s
sake,
The drilled dull lesson, forced
down word by word
In my repugnant youth, with pleasure to record
Aught that recalls the daily drug
which turned
My sickening memory; and, though
Time hath taught
My mind to meditate what then it
learned,
Yet such the fixed inveteracy wrought
By the impatience of my early thought,
That, with the freshness wearing
out before
My mind could relish what it might
have sought,
If free to choose, I cannot now
restore
Its health; but what it then detested, still abhor.
Then farewell, Horace; whom I hated
so,
Not for thy faults, but mine; it
is a curse
To understand, not feel, thy lyric
flow,
To comprehend, but never love thy
verse,
Although no deeper moralist rehearse
Our little life, nor bard prescribe
his art,
Nor livelier satirist the conscience
pierce,
Awakening without wounding the touched
heart,
Yet fare thee well—upon Soracte’s
ridge we part.
O 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
The cypress, hear the owl, and plod
your way
O’er steps of broken thrones
and temples, Ye!
Whose agonies are evils of a day—
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,
Whose holy dust was scattered long
ago;
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!
The Goth, the Christian, Time, War,
Flood, and Fire,
Have dwelt 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 wrap
All round us; we but feel our way
to err:
The ocean hath its 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’s 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!
O thou, whose chariot rolled on
Fortune’s wheel,
Triumphant Sylla! Thou, who
didst subdue
Thy country’s foes ere thou
wouldst pause to feel
The wrath of thy own wrongs, or
reap the due
Of hoarded vengeance till thine
eagles flew
O’er prostrate Asia;—thou,
who with thy frown
Annihilated senates—Roman,
too,
With all thy vices, for thou didst
lay down
With an atoning smile a more than earthly crown —
The dictatorial wreath,—couldst
thou divine
To what would one day dwindle that
which made
Thee more than mortal? and that
so supine
By aught than Romans Rome should
thus be laid?
She who was named eternal, and arrayed
Her warriors but to conquer—she
who veiled
Earth with her haughty shadow, and
displayed
Until the o’er-canopied horizon
failed,
Her rushing wings—Oh! she who was almighty
hailed!
Sylla was first of victors; but
our own,
The sagest of usurpers, Cromwell!—he
Too swept off senates while he hewed
the throne
Down to a block—immortal
rebel! See
What crimes it costs to be a moment
free
And famous through all ages!
But beneath
His fate the moral lurks of destiny;
His day of double victory and death
Beheld him win two realms, and, happier, yield his
breath.
The third of the same moon whose
former course
Had all but crowned him, on the
self-same day
Deposed him gently from his throne
of force,
And laid him with the earth’s
preceding clay.
And showed not Fortune thus how
fame and sway,
And all we deem delightful, and
consume
Our souls to compass through each
arduous way,
Are in her eyes less happy than
the tomb?
Were they but so in man’s, how different were
his doom!
And thou, dread statue! yet existent
in
The austerest form of naked majesty,
Thou who beheldest, mid the assassins’
din,
At thy bathed base the bloody Caesar
lie,
Folding his robe in dying dignity,
An offering to thine altar from
the queen
Of gods and men, great Nemesis!
did he die,
And thou, too, perish, Pompey? have
ye been
Victors of countless kings, or puppets of a scene?
And thou, the thunder-stricken nurse
of Rome!
She-wolf! whose brazen-imaged dugs
impart
The milk of conquest yet within
the dome
Where, as a monument of antique
art,
Thou standest: —Mother
of the mighty heart,
Which the great founder sucked from
thy wild teat,
Scorched by the Roman Jove’s
ethereal dart,
And thy limbs blacked with lightning—dost
thou yet
Guard thine immortal cubs, nor thy fond charge forget?
Thou dost;—but all thy
foster-babes are dead —
The men of iron; and the world hath
reared
Cities from out their sepulchres:
men bled
In imitation of the things they
feared,
And fought and conquered, and the
same course steered,
At apish distance; but as yet none
have,
Nor could, the same supremacy have
neared,
Save one vain man, who is not in
the grave,
But, vanquished by himself, to his own slaves a slave,
The fool of false dominion—and
a kind
Of bastard Caesar, following him
of old
With steps unequal; for the Roman’s
mind
Was modelled in a less terrestrial
mould,
With passions fiercer, yet a judgment
cold,
And an immortal instinct which redeemed
The frailties of a heart so soft,
yet bold.
Alcides with the distaff now he
seemed
At Cleopatra’s feet, and now himself he beamed.
And came, and saw, and conquered.
But the man
Who would have tamed his eagles
down to flee,
Like a trained falcon, in the Gallic
van,
Which he, in sooth, long led to
victory,
With a deaf heart which never seemed
to be
A listener to itself, was strangely
framed;
With but one weakest weakness—vanity:
Coquettish in ambition, still he
aimed
At what? Can he avouch, or answer what he claimed?
And would be all or nothing—nor
could wait
For the sure grave to level him;
few years
Had fixed him with the Caesars in
his fate,
On whom we tread: For this
the conqueror rears
The arch of triumph! and for this
the tears
And blood of earth flow on as they
have flowed,
An universal deluge, which appears
Without an ark for wretched man’s
abode,
And ebbs but to reflow!—Renew thy rainbow,
God!
What from this barren being do we
reap?
Our senses narrow, and our reason
frail,
Life short, and truth a gem which
loves the deep,
And all things weighed in custom’s
falsest scale;
Opinion an omnipotence, whose veil
Mantles the earth with darkness,
until right
And wrong are accidents, and men
grow pale
Lest their own judgments should
become too bright,
And their free thoughts be crimes, and earth have
too much light.
And thus they plod in sluggish misery,
Rotting from sire to son, and age
to age,
Proud of their trampled nature,
and so die,
Bequeathing their hereditary rage
To the new race of inborn slaves,
who wage
War for their chains, and rather
than be free,
Bleed gladiator-like, and still
engage
Within the same arena where they
see
Their fellows fall before, like leaves of the same
tree.
I speak not of men’s creeds—they
rest between
Man and his Maker—but
of things allowed,
Averred, and known,—and
daily, hourly seen —
The yoke that is upon us doubly
bowed,
And the intent of tyranny avowed,
The edict of Earth’s rulers,
who are grown
The apes of him who humbled once
the proud,
And shook them from their slumbers
on the throne;
Too glorious, were this all his mighty arm had done.
Can tyrants but by tyrants conquered
be,
And Freedom find no champion and
no child
Such as Columbia saw arise when
she
Sprung forth a Pallas, armed and
undefiled?
Or must such minds be nourished
in the wild,
Deep in the unpruned forest, midst
the roar
Of cataracts, where nursing nature
smiled
On infant Washington? Has
Earth no more
Such seeds within her breast, or Europe no such shore?
But France got drunk with blood
to vomit crime,
And fatal have her Saturnalia been
To Freedom’s cause, in every
age and clime;
Because the deadly days which we
have seen,
And vile Ambition, that built up
between
Man and his hopes an adamantine
wall,
And the base pageant last upon the
scene,
Are grown the pretext for the eternal
thrall
Which nips Life’s tree, and dooms man’s
worst—his second fall.
Yet, Freedom! yet thy banner, torn,
but flying,
Streams like the thunder-storm against
the wind;
Thy trumpet-voice, though broken
now and dying,
The loudest still the tempest leaves
behind;
Thy tree hath lost its blossoms,
and the rind,
Chopped by the axe, looks rough
and little worth,
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.
There is a stern round tower of
other days,
Firm as a fortress, with its fence
of stone,
Such as an army’s baffled
strength delays,
Standing with half its battlements
alone,
And with two thousand years of ivy
grown,
The garland of eternity, where wave
The green leaves over all by time
o’erthrown:
What was this tower of strength?
within its cave
What treasure lay so locked, so hid?—A
woman’s grave.
But who was she, the lady of the
dead,
Tombed in a palace? Was she
chaste and fair?
Worthy a king’s—or
more—a Roman’s bed?
What race of chiefs and heroes did
she bear?
What daughter of her beauties was
the heir?
How lived—how loved—how
died she? Was she not
So honoured—and conspicuously
there,
Where meaner relics must not dare
to rot,
Placed to commemorate a more than mortal lot?
Was she as those who love their
lords, or they
Who love the lords of others? such
have been
Even in the olden time, Rome’s
annals say.
Was she a matron of Cornelia’s
mien,
Or the light air of Egypt’s
graceful queen,
Profuse of joy; or ’gainst
it did she war,
Inveterate in virtue? Did
she lean
To the soft side of the heart, or
wisely bar
Love from amongst her griefs?—for such
the affections are.
Perchance she died in youth:
it may be, bowed
With woes far heavier than the ponderous
tomb
That weighed upon her gentle dust,
a cloud
Might gather o’er her beauty,
and a gloom
In her dark eye, prophetic of the
doom
Heaven gives its favourites—early
death; yet shed
A sunset charm around her, and illume
With hectic light, the Hesperus
of the dead,
Of her consuming cheek the autumnal leaf-like red.
Perchance she died in age—surviving
all,
Charms, kindred, children—with
the silver grey
On her long tresses, which might
yet recall,
It may be, still a something of
the day
When they were braided, and her
proud array
And lovely form were envied, praised,
and eyed
By Rome—But whither would
Conjecture stray?
Thus much alone we know—Metella
died,
The wealthiest Roman’s wife: Behold his
love or pride!
I know not why—but standing
thus by thee
It seems as if I had thine inmate
known,
Thou Tomb! and other days come back
on me
With recollected music, though the
tone
Is changed and solemn, like the
cloudy groan
Of dying thunder on the distant
wind;
Yet could I seat me by this ivied
stone
Till I had bodied forth the heated
mind,
Forms from the floating wreck which ruin leaves behind;
And from the planks, far shattered
o’er the rocks,
Built me a little bark of hope,
once more
To battle with the ocean and the
shocks
Of the loud breakers, and the ceaseless
roar
Which rushes on the solitary shore
Where all lies foundered that was
ever dear:
But could I gather from the wave-worn
store
Enough for my rude boat, where should
I steer?
There woos no home, nor hope, nor life, save what
is here.
Then let the winds howl on! their
harmony
Shall henceforth be my music, and
the night
The sound shall temper with the
owlet’s cry,
As I now hear them, in the fading
light
Dim o’er the bird of darkness’
native site,
Answer each other on the Palatine,
With their large eyes, all glistening
grey and bright,
And sailing pinions.—Upon
such a shrine
What are our petty griefs?—let me not number
mine.
Cypress and ivy, weed and wallflower
grown
Matted and massed together, hillocks
heaped
On what were chambers, arch crushed,
column strown
In fragments, choked-up vaults,
and frescoes steeped
In subterranean damps, where the
owl peeped,
Deeming it midnight: —Temples,
baths, or halls?
Pronounce who can; for all that
Learning reaped
From her research hath been, that
these are walls —
Behold the Imperial Mount! ’tis thus the mighty
falls.
There is the moral of all human
tales:
’Tis but the same rehearsal
of the past,
First Freedom, and then Glory—when
that fails,
Wealth, vice, corruption—barbarism
at last.
And History, with all her volumes
Admire, exult—despise—laugh,
weep—for here
There is such matter for all feeling:
—Man!
Thou pendulum betwixt a smile and
tear,
Ages and realms are crowded in this
span,
This mountain, whose obliterated
plan
The pyramid of empires pinnacled,
Of Glory’s gewgaws shining
in the van
Till the sun’s rays with added
flame were filled!
Where are its golden roofs? where those who dared
to build?
Tully was not so eloquent as thou,
Thou nameless column with the buried
base!
What are the laurels of the Caesar’s
brow?
Crown me with ivy from his dwelling-place.
Whose arch or pillar meets me in
the face,
Titus or Trajan’s? No;
’tis that of Time:
Triumph, arch, pillar, all he doth
displace,
Scoffing; and apostolic statues
climb
To crush the imperial urn, whose ashes slept sublime,
Buried in air, the deep blue sky
of Rome,
And looking to the stars; they had
contained
A spirit which with these would
find a home,
The last of those who o’er
the whole earth reigned,
The Roman globe, for after none
sustained
But yielded back his conquests:
—he was more
Than a mere Alexander, and unstained
With household blood and wine, serenely
wore
His sovereign virtues—still we Trajan’s
name adore.
Where is the rock of Triumph, the
high place
Where Rome embraced her heroes?
where the steep
Tarpeian—fittest goal
of Treason’s race,
The promontory whence the traitor’s
leap
Cured all ambition? Did the
Conquerors heap
Their spoils here? Yes; and
in yon field below,
A thousand years of silenced factions
sleep —
The Forum, where the immortal accents
glow,
And still the eloquent air breathes—burns
with Cicero!
The field of freedom, faction, fame,
and blood:
Here a proud people’s passions
were exhaled,
From the first hour of empire in
the bud
To that when further worlds to conquer
failed;
But long before had Freedom’s
face been veiled,
And Anarchy assumed her attributes:
Till every lawless soldier who assailed
Trod on the trembling Senate’s
slavish mutes,
Or raised the venal voice of baser prostitutes.
Then turn we to our latest tribune’s
name,
From her ten thousand tyrants turn
to thee,
Redeemer of dark centuries of shame
—
The friend of Petrarch—hope
of Italy —
Rienzi! last of Romans! While
the tree
Of freedom’s withered trunk
puts forth a leaf,
Even for thy tomb a garland let
it be—
The forum’s champion, and
the people’s chief —
Her new-born Numa thou, with reign, alas! too brief.
Egeria! sweet creation of some heart
Which found no mortal resting-place
so fair
As thine ideal breast; whate’er
thou art
Or wert,—a young Aurora
of the air,
The nympholepsy of some fond despair;
Or, it might be, a beauty of the
earth,
Who found a more than common votary
there
Too much adoring; whatsoe’er
thy birth,
Thou wert a beautiful thought, and softly bodied forth.
The mosses of thy fountain still
are sprinkled
With thine Elysian water-drops;
the face
Of thy cave-guarded spring, with
years unwrinkled,
Reflects the meek-eyed genius of
the place,
Whose green wild margin now no more
erase
Art’s works; nor must the
delicate waters sleep,
Prisoned in marble, bubbling from
the base
Of the cleft statue, with a gentle
leap
The rill runs o’er, and round, fern, flowers,
and ivy creep,
Fantastically tangled; the green
hills
Are clothed with early blossoms,
through the grass
The quick-eyed lizard rustles, and
the bills
Of summer birds sing welcome as
ye pass;
Flowers fresh in hue, and many in
their class,
Implore the pausing step, and with
their dyes
Dance in the soft breeze in a fairy
mass;
The sweetness of the violet’s
deep blue eyes,
Kissed by the breath of heaven, seems coloured by
its skies.
Here didst thou dwell, in this enchanted
cover,
Egeria! thy all heavenly bosom beating
For the far footsteps of thy mortal
lover;
The purple Midnight veiled that
mystic meeting
With her most starry canopy, and
seating
Thyself by thine adorer, what befell?
This cave was surely shaped out
for the greeting
Of an enamoured Goddess, and the
cell
Haunted by holy Love—the earliest oracle!
And didst thou not, thy breast to
his replying,
Blend a celestial with a human heart;
And Love, which dies as it was born,
in sighing,
Share with immortal transports?
could thine art
Make them indeed immortal, and impart
The purity of heaven to earthly
joys,
Expel the venom and not blunt the
dart —
The dull satiety which all destroys—
And root from out the soul the deadly weed which cloys?
Alas! our young affections run to
waste,
Or water but the desert: whence
arise
But weeds of dark luxuriance, tares
of haste,
Rank at the core, though tempting
to the eyes,
Flowers whose wild odours breathe
but agonies,
And trees whose gums are poison;
such the plants
Which spring beneath her steps as
Passion flies
O’er the world’s wilderness,
and vainly pants
For some celestial fruit forbidden to our wants.
O Love! no habitant of earth thou
art —
An unseen seraph, we believe in
thee,—
A faith whose martyrs are the broken
heart,
But never yet hath seen, nor e’er
shall see,
The naked eye, thy form, as it should
be;
The mind hath made thee, as it peopled
heaven,
Even with its own desiring phantasy,
And to a thought such shape and
image given,
As haunts the unquenched soul—parched—wearied—wrung—and
riven.
Of its own beauty is the mind diseased,
And fevers into false creation;—where,
Where are the forms the sculptor’s
soul hath seized?
In him alone. Can Nature show
so fair?
Where are the charms and virtues
which we dare
Conceive in boyhood and pursue as
men,
The unreached Paradise of our despair,
Which o’er-informs the pencil
and the pen,
And overpowers the page where it would bloom again.
Who loves, raves—’tis
youth’s frenzy—but the cure
Is bitterer still; as charm by charm
unwinds
Which robed our idols, and we see
too sure
Nor worth nor beauty dwells from
out the mind’s
Ideal shape of such; yet still it
binds
The fatal spell, and still it draws
us on,
Reaping the whirlwind from the oft-sown
winds;
The stubborn heart, its alchemy
begun,
Seems ever near the prize—wealthiest when
most undone.
We wither from our youth, we gasp
away —
Sick—sick; unfound the
boon, unslaked the thirst,
Though to the last, in verge of
our decay,
Some phantom lures, such as we sought
at first —
But all too late,—so
are we doubly curst.
Love, fame, ambition, avarice—’tis
the same —
Each idle, and all ill, and none
the worst —
For all are meteors with a different
name,
And death the sable smoke where vanishes the flame.
Few—none—find
what they love or could have loved:
Though accident, blind contact,
and the strong
Necessity of loving, have removed
Antipathies—but to recur,
ere long,
Envenomed with irrevocable wrong;
And Circumstance, that unspiritual
god
And miscreator, makes and helps
along
Our coming evils with a crutch-like
rod,
Whose touch turns hope to dust—the dust
we all have trod.
Our life is a false nature—’tis
not in
The harmony of things,—this
hard decree,
This uneradicable taint of sin,
This boundless upas, this all-blasting
tree,
Whose root is earth, whose leaves
and branches be
The skies which rain their plagues
on men like dew —
Disease, death, bondage, all the
woes we see—
And worse, the woes we see not—which
throb through
The immedicable soul, with heart-aches ever new.
Yet let us ponder boldly—’tis
a base
Abandonment of reason to resign
Our right of thought—our
last and only place
Of refuge; this, at least, shall
still be mine:
Though from our birth the faculty
divine
Is chained and tortured—cabined,
cribbed, confined,
And bred in darkness, lest the truth
should shine
Too brightly on the unprepared mind,
The beam pours in, for time and skill will couch the
blind.
Arches on arches! as it were that
Rome,
Collecting the chief trophies of
her line,
Would build up all her triumphs
in one dome,
Her Coliseum stands; the moonbeams
shine
As ’twere its natural torches,
for divine
Should be the light which streams
here, to illume
This long explored but still exhaustless
mine
Of contemplation; and the azure
gloom
Of an Italian night, where the deep skies assume
Hues which have words, and speak
to ye of heaven,
Floats o’er this vast and
wondrous monument,
And shadows forth its glory.
There is given
Unto the things of earth, which
Time hath bent,
A spirit’s feeling, and where
he hath leant
His hand, but broke his scythe,
there is a power
And magic in the ruined battlement,
For which the palace of the present
hour
Must yield its pomp, and wait till ages are its dower.
O Time! the beautifier of the dead,
Adorner of the ruin, comforter
And only healer when the heart hath
bled —
Time! the corrector where our judgments
err,
The test of truth, love,—sole
philosopher,
For all beside are sophists, from
thy thrift,
Which never loses though it doth
defer —
Time, the avenger! unto thee I lift
My hands, and eyes, and heart, and crave of thee a
gift:
Amidst this wreck, where thou hast
made a shrine
And temple more divinely desolate,
Among thy mightier offerings here
are mine,
Ruins of years—though
few, yet full of fate:
If thou hast ever seen me too elate,
Hear me not; but if calmly I have
borne
Good, and reserved my pride against
the hate
Which shall not whelm me, let me
not have worn
This iron in my soul in vain—shall they
not mourn?
And thou, who never yet of human
wrong
Left the unbalanced scale, great
Nemesis!
Here, where the ancients paid thee
homage long —
Thou, who didst call the Furies
from the abyss,
And round Orestes bade them howl
and hiss
For that unnatural retribution—just,
Had it but been from hands less
near—in this
Thy former realm, I call thee from
the dust!
Dost thou not hear my heart?—Awake! thou
shalt, and must.
It is not that I may not have incurred
For my ancestral faults or mine
the wound
I bleed withal, and had it been
conferred
With a just weapon, it had flowed
unbound.
But now my blood shall not sink
in the ground;
To thee I do devote it—thou
shalt take
The vengeance, which shall yet be
sought and found,
Which if I have not taken
for the sake —
But let that pass—I sleep, but thou shalt
yet awake.
And if my voice break forth, ’tis
not that now
I shrink from what is suffered:
let him speak
Who hath beheld decline upon my
brow,
Or seen my mind’s convulsion
leave it weak;
But in this page a record will I
seek.
Not in the air shall these my words
disperse,
Though I be ashes; a far hour shall
wreak
The deep prophetic fulness of this
verse,
And pile on human heads the mountain of my curse!
That curse shall be forgiveness.—Have
I not —
Hear me, my mother Earth! behold
it, Heaven! —
Have I not had to wrestle with my
lot?
Have I not suffered things to be
forgiven?
Have I not had my brain seared,
my heart riven,
Hopes sapped, name blighted, Life’s
life lied away?
And only not to desperation driven,
Because not altogether of such clay
As rots into the souls of those whom I survey.
From mighty wrongs to petty perfidy
Have I not seen what human things
could do?
From the loud roar of foaming calumny
To the small whisper of the as paltry
few
And subtler venom of the reptile
crew,
The Janus glance of whose significant
eye,
Learning to lie with silence, would
seem true,
And without utterance, save the
shrug or sigh,
Deal round to happy fools its speechless obloquy.
But I have lived, and have not lived
in vain:
My mind may lose its force, my blood
its fire,
And my frame perish even in conquering
pain,
But there is that within me which
shall tire
Torture and Time, and breathe when
I expire:
Something unearthly, which they
deem not of,
Like the remembered tone of a mute
lyre,
Shall on their softened spirits
sink, and move
In hearts all rocky now the late remorse of love.
The seal is set.—Now
welcome, thou dread Power
Nameless, yet thus omnipotent, which
here
Walk’st in the shadow of the
midnight hour
With a deep awe, yet all distinct
from fear:
Thy haunts are ever where the dead
walls rear
Their ivy mantles, and the solemn
scene
Derives from thee a sense so deep
and clear
That we become a part of what has
been,
And grow unto the spot, all-seeing but unseen.
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 because
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 rot.
I see before me the Gladiator lie:
He leans upon his hand—his
manly brow
Consents to death, but conquers
agony,
And his drooped head sinks gradually
low —
And through his side the last drops,
ebbing slow
From the red gash, fall heavy, one
by one,
Like the first of a thunder-shower;
and now
The arena swims around him:
he is gone,
Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hailed the wretch
who won.
He heard it, but he heeded not—his
eyes
Were with his heart, and that was
far away;
He recked not of the life he lost
nor prize,
But where his rude hut by the Danube
lay,
there were his young barbarians
all at play,
there was their Dacian mother—he,
their sire,
Butchered to make a Roman holiday
—
All this rushed with his blood—Shall
he expire,
And unavenged?—Arise! ye Goths, and glut
your ire!
But here, where murder breathed
her bloody steam;
And here, where buzzing nations
choked the ways,
And roared or murmured like a mountain-stream
Dashing or winding as its torrent
strays;
Here, where the Roman million’s
blame or praise
Was death or life, the playthings
of a crowd,
My voice sounds much—and
fall the stars’ faint rays
On the arena void—seats
crushed, walls bowed,
And galleries, where my steps seem echoes strangely
loud.
A ruin—yet what ruin!
from its mass
Walls, palaces, half-cities, have
been reared;
Yet oft the enormous skeleton ye
pass,
And marvel where the spoil could
have appeared.
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.
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 grey
walls wear,
Like laurels on the bald first Caesar’s
head;
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.’ From our own land
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
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.
Simple, erect, severe, austere,
sublime —
Shrine of all saints and temple
of all gods,
From Jove to Jesus—spared
and blest by time;
Looking tranquillity, while falls
or nods
Arch, empire, each thing round thee,
and man plods
His way through thorns to ashes—glorious
dome!
Shalt thou not last?—Time’s
scythe and tyrants’ rods
Shiver upon thee—sanctuary
and home
Of art and piety—Pantheon!—pride
of Rome!
Relic of nobler days, and noblest
arts!
Despoiled yet perfect, with thy
circle spreads
A holiness appealing to all hearts—
To art a model; and to him who treads
Rome for the sake of ages, Glory
sheds
Her light through thy sole aperture;
to those
Who worship, here are altars for
their beads;
And they who feel for genius may
repose
Their eyes on honoured forms, whose busts around them
close.
There is a dungeon, in whose dim
drear light
What do I gaze on? Nothing:
Look again!
Two forms are slowly shadowed on
my sight —
Two insulated phantoms of the brain:
It is not so: I see them full
and plain —
An old man, and a female young and
fair,
Fresh as a nursing mother, in whose
vein
The blood is nectar: —but
what doth she there,
With her unmantled neck, and bosom white and bare?
Full swells the deep pure fountain
of young life,
Where on the heart and from
the heart we took
Our first and sweetest nurture,
when the wife,
Blest into mother, in the innocent
look,
Or even the piping cry of lips that
brook
No pain and small suspense, a joy
perceives
Man knows not, when from out its
cradled nook
She sees her little bud put forth
its leaves —
What may the fruit be yet?—I know not—Cain
was Eve’s.
But here youth offers to old age
the food,
The milk of his own gift: —it
is her sire
To whom she renders back the debt
of blood
Born with her birth. No; he
shall not expire
While in those warm and lovely veins
the fire
Of health and holy feeling can provide
Great Nature’s Nile, whose
deep stream rises higher
Than Egypt’s river: —from
that gentle side
Drink, drink and live, old man! heaven’s realm
holds no such tide.
The starry fable of the milky way
Has not thy story’s purity;
it is
A constellation of a sweeter ray,
And sacred Nature triumphs more
in this
Reverse of her decree, than in the
abyss
Where sparkle distant worlds:
—Oh, holiest nurse!
No drop of that clear stream its
way shall miss
To thy sire’s heart, replenishing
its source
With life, as our freed souls rejoin the universe.
Turn to the mole which Hadrian reared
on high,
Imperial mimic of old Egypt’s
piles,
Colossal copyist of deformity,
Whose travelled phantasy from the
far Nile’s
Enormous model, doomed the artist’s
toils
To build for giants, and for his
vain earth,
His shrunken ashes, raise this dome:
How smiles
The gazer’s eye with philosophic
mirth,
To view the huge design which sprung from such a birth!
But lo! the dome—the
vast and wondrous dome,
To which Diana’s marvel was
a cell—
Christ’s mighty shrine above
his martyr’s tomb!
I have beheld the Ephesian’s
miracle—
Its columns strew the wilderness,
and dwell
The hyaena and the jackal in their
shade;
I have beheld Sophia’s bright
roofs swell
Their glittering mass i’ the
sun, and have surveyed
Its sanctuary the while the usurping Moslem prayed;
But thou, of temples old, or altars
new,
Standest alone—with nothing
like to thee —
Worthiest of God, the holy and the
true,
Since Zion’s desolation, when
that he
Forsook his former city, what could
be,
Of earthly structures, in his honour
piled,
Of a sublimer aspect? Majesty,
Power, Glory, Strength, and Beauty,
all are aisled
In this eternal ark of worship undefiled.
Enter: its grandeur overwhelms
thee not;
And why? it is not lessened; but
thy mind,
Expanded by the genius of the spot,
Has grown colossal, and can only
find
A fit abode wherein appear enshrined
Thy hopes of immortality; and thou
Shalt one day, if found worthy,
so defined,
See thy God face to face, as thou
dost now
His Holy of Holies, nor be blasted by his brow.
Thou movest—but increasing
with th’ advance,
Like climbing some great Alp, which
still doth rise,
Deceived by its gigantic elegance;
Vastness which grows—but
grows to harmonise —
All musical in its immensities;
Rich marbles—richer painting—shrines
where flame
The lamps of gold—and
haughty dome which vies
In air with Earth’s chief
structures, though their frame
Sits on the firm-set ground—and this the
clouds must claim.
Thou seest not all; but piecemeal
thou must break
To separate contemplation, the great
whole;
And as the ocean many bays will
make,
That ask the eye—so here
condense thy soul
To more immediate objects, and control
Thy thoughts until thy mind hath
got by heart
Its eloquent proportions, and unroll
In mighty graduations, part by part,
The glory which at once upon thee did not dart.
Not by its fault—but
thine: Our outward sense
Is but of gradual grasp—and
as it is
That what we have of feeling most
intense
Outstrips our faint expression;
e’en so this
Outshining and o’erwhelming
edifice
Fools our fond gaze, and greatest
of the great
Defies at first our nature’s
littleness,
Till, growing with its growth, we
thus dilate
Our spirits to the size of that they contemplate.
Then pause and be enlightened; there
is more
In such a survey than the sating
gaze
Of wonder pleased, or awe which
would adore
The worship of the place, or the
mere praise
Of art and its great masters, who
could raise
What former time, nor skill, nor
thought could plan;
The fountain of sublimity displays
Its depth, and thence may draw the
mind of man
Its golden sands, and learn what great conceptions
can.
Or, turning to the Vatican, go see
Laocoon’s torture dignifying
pain —
A father’s love and mortal’s
agony
With an immortal’s patience
blending: —Vain
The struggle; vain, against the
coiling strain
And gripe, and deepening of the
dragon’s grasp,
The old man’s clench; the
long envenomed chain
Rivets the living links,—the
enormous asp
Enforces pang on pang, and stifles gasp on gasp.
Or view the Lord of the unerring
bow,
The God of life, and poesy, and
light —
The Sun in human limbs arrayed,
and brow
All radiant from his triumph in
the fight;
The shaft hath just been shot—the
arrow bright
With an immortal’s vengeance;
in his eye
And nostril beautiful disdain, and
might
And majesty, flash their full lightnings
by,
Developing in that one glance the Deity.
But in his delicate form—a
dream of Love,
Shaped by some solitary nymph, whose
breast
Longed for a deathless lover from
above,
And maddened in that vision—are
expressed
All that ideal beauty ever blessed
The mind within its most unearthly
mood,
When each conception was a heavenly
guest —
A ray of immortality—and
stood
Starlike, around, until they gathered to a god?
And if it be Prometheus stole from
heaven
The fire which we endure, it was
repaid
By him to whom the energy was given
Which this poetic marble hath arrayed
With an eternal glory—which,
if made
By human hands, is not of human
thought
And Time himself hath hallowed it,
nor laid
One ringlet in the dust—nor
hath it caught
A tinge of years, but breathes the flame with which
’twas wrought.
But where is he, the pilgrim of
my song,
The being who upheld it through
the past?
Methinks he cometh late and tarries
long.
He is no more—these breathings
are his last;
His wanderings done, his visions
ebbing fast,
And he himself as nothing:
—if he was
Aught but a phantasy, and could
be classed
With forms which live and suffer—let
that pass —
His shadow fades away into Destruction’s mass,
Which gathers shadow, substance,
life, and all
That we inherit in its mortal shroud,
And spreads the dim and universal
pall
Thro’ which all things grow
phantoms; and the cloud
Between us sinks and all which ever
glowed,
Till Glory’s self is twilight,
and displays
A melancholy halo scarce allowed
To hover on the verge of darkness;
rays
Sadder than saddest night, for they distract the gaze,
And send us prying into the abyss,
To gather what we shall be when
the frame
Shall be resolved to something less
than this
Its wretched essence; and to dream
of fame,
And wipe the dust from off the idle
name
We never more shall hear,—but
never more,
Oh, happier thought! can we be made
the same:
It is enough, in sooth, that once
we bore
These fardels of the heart—the heart whose
sweat was gore.
Hark! forth from the abyss a voice
proceeds,
A long, low distant murmur of dread
sound,
Such as arises when a nation bleeds
With some deep and immedicable wound;
Through storm and darkness yawns
the rending ground.
The gulf is thick with phantoms,
but the chief
Seems royal still, though with her
head discrowned,
And pale, but lovely, with maternal
grief
She clasps a babe, to whom her breast yields no relief.
Scion of chiefs and monarchs, where
art thou?
Fond hope of many nations, art thou
dead?
Could not the grave forget thee,
and lay low
Some less majestic, less beloved
head?
In the sad midnight, while thy heart
still bled,
The mother of a moment, o’er
thy boy,
Death hushed that pang for ever:
with thee fled
The present happiness and promised
joy
Which filled the imperial isles so full it seemed
to cloy.
Peasants bring forth in safety.—Can
it be,
O thou that wert so happy, so adored!
Those who weep not for kings shall
weep for thee,
And Freedom’s heart, grown
heavy, cease to hoard
Her many griefs for One; for she
had poured
Her orisons for thee, and o’er
thy head
Beheld her Iris.—Thou,
too, lonely lord,
And desolate consort—vainly
wert thou wed!
The husband of a year! the father of the dead!
Of sackcloth was thy wedding garment
made:
Thy bridal’s fruit is ashes;
in the dust
The fair-haired Daughter of the
Isles is laid,
The love of millions! How
we did entrust
Futurity to her! and, though it
must
Darken above our bones, yet fondly
deemed
Our children should obey her child,
and blessed
Her and her hoped-for seed, whose
promise seemed
Like star to shepherd’s eyes; ’twas but
a meteor beamed.
Woe unto us, not her; for she sleeps
well:
The fickle reek of popular breath,
the tongue
Of hollow counsel, the false oracle,
Which from the birth of monarchy
hath rung
Its knell in princely ears, till
the o’erstrung
Nations have armed in madness, the
strange fate
Which tumbles mightiest sovereigns,
and hath flung
Against their blind omnipotence
a weight
Within the opposing scale, which crushes soon or late,
—
These might have been her destiny;
but no,
Our hearts deny it: and so
young, so fair,
Good without effort, great without
a foe;
But now a bride and mother—and
now there!
Lo, Nemi! navelled in the woody
hills
So far, that the uprooting wind
which tears
The oak from his foundation, and
which spills
The ocean o’er its boundary,
and bears
Its foam against the skies, reluctant
spares
The oval mirror of thy glassy lake;
And, calm as cherished hate, its
surface wears
A deep cold settled aspect nought
can shake,
All coiled into itself and round, as sleeps the snake.
And near Albano’s scarce divided
waves
Shine from a sister valley;—and
afar
The Tiber winds, and the broad ocean
laves
The Latian coast where sprung the
Epic war,
‘Arms and the Man,’
whose reascending star
Rose o’er an empire,—but
beneath thy right
Tully reposed from Rome;—and
where yon bar
Of girdling mountains intercepts
the sight,
The Sabine farm was tilled, the weary bard’s
delight.
But I forget.—My pilgrim’s
shrine is won,
And he and I must part,—so
let it be, —
His task and mine alike are nearly
done;
Yet once more let us look upon the
sea:
The midland ocean breaks on him
and me,
And from the Alban mount we now
behold
Our friend of youth, that ocean,
which when we
Beheld it last by Calpe’s
rock unfold
Those waves, we followed on till the dark Euxine rolled
Upon the blue Symplegades:
long years —
Long, though not very many—since
have done
Their work on both; some suffering
and some tears
Have left us nearly where we had
begun:
Yet not in vain our mortal race
hath run,
We have had our reward—and
it is here;
That we can yet feel gladdened by
the sun,
And reap from earth, sea, joy almost
as dear
As if there were no man to trouble what is clear.
Oh! that the Desert were my dwelling-place,
With one fair Spirit for my minister,
That I might all forget the human
race,
And, hating no one, love but only
her!
Ye Elements!—in whose
ennobling stir
I feel myself exalted—can
ye not
Accord me such a being? Do
I err
In deeming such inhabit many a spot?
Though with them to converse can rarely be our lot.
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 conceal.
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 unknown.
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
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 walls
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 Trafalgar.
Thy shores are empires, changed
in all save thee —
Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage,
what are they?
Thy waters wasted them 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.
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, fathomless,
alone.
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.
My task is done—my song
hath ceased—my theme
Has died into an echo; it is fit
The spell should break of this protracted
dream.
The torch shall be extinguished
which hath lit
My midnight lamp—and
what is writ, is writ —
Would it were worthier! but I am
not now
That which I have been—and
my visions flit
Less palpably before me—and
the glow
Which in my spirit dwelt is fluttering, faint, and
low.
Farewell! a word that must be, and
hath been —
A sound which makes us linger; yet,
farewell!
Ye, who have traced the Pilgrim
to the scene
Which is his last, if in your memories
dwell
A thought which once was his, if
on ye swell
A single recollection, not in vain
He wore his sandal-shoon and scallop
shell;
Farewell! with him alone may
rest the pain,
If such there were—with you, the moral
of his strain.
Footnotes:
{1} Lady Charlotte Harley, daughter of the Earl of Oxford.
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