XCI. And thou, my friend!! since unavailing woe By all forgotten, save the lonely breast, What hadst thou done to sink so peacefully to rest? XCII. Oh, known the earliest, and esteem'd the most! 2 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 mourn'd and mourner lie united in repose. ХСІП. 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 doom'd to go: Lands that contain the monuments of Eld, Ere Greece and Grecian arts by barbarous hands were quell'd. 3 his fame on the spot where it was acquired; while his softer qualities live in the recollection of friends who loved him too well to envy his superiority. [This and the following stanza were added in August, 1811. In one of his school-boy poems, entitled "Childish Recollections," Lord Byron has thus drawn the portrait of young Wingfield : "Alonzo! best and dearest of my friends, Thy name ennobles him who thus commends: Oh in the promise of thy early youth, If hope anticipates the words of truth, All, all that brothers should be, but the name." Matthews, the idol of Lord Byron at college, was drowned, while bathing in the Cam, on the 2d of August. The following passage of a letter from Newstead to his friend Scrope Davies, written immediately after the event, bears the impress of strong and even agonised feelings: My dearest Davies; some curse hangs over me and mine. My mother lies a corpse in the house; one of my best friends is drowned in a ditch. What can I say, or think, or do? I received a letter from him the day before yesterday. My dear Scrope, if you can spare a moment, do come down to me I want a friend. Matthews's last letter was written on Friday, on Saturday he was not. In ability, who was like Matthews? How did we all shrink before him. You do me but justice in saying I would have risked my paltry existence to have preserved his. This very evening did I mean to write, inviting him, as I invite you, my very dear friend, to visit me. What will our poor Hobhouse feel? His letters breathe but of Matthews. Come to me, Scrope, I am almost desolate left almost alone in the world!"-Matthews was the son of John Matthews, Esq. (the representative of Herefordshire, in the parliament of 1802-6), and brother of the author of The Diary of an Invalid," also untimely snatched away.] * [" Beloved the most."— MS.] 3 [" Dec. 30th, 1809,"— MS.] 1 Part of the Acropolis was destroyed by the explosion of a magazine during the Venetian siege.-[Ón the highest part of Lycabettus, as Chandler was informed by an eye-witness, the Venetians, in 1687, placed four mortars and six pieces of cannon, when they battered the Acropolis. One of the bombs was fatal to some of the sculpture on the west front of the Parthenon. "In 1667," says Mr. Hobhouse, "every antiquity of which there is now any trace in the Acropolis, was in a tolerable state of preservation. This great temple might, at that period, be called entire;- having been previously a Christian church, it was then a mosque, the most beautiful in the world. At present, only twenty-nine of the Doric columns, some of which no longer support their entablatures, and part of the left wall of the cell, remain standing. Those of the north side, the angular ones excepted, have all fallen. The portion yet standing, cannot fail to fill the mind of the indifferent spectator with sentiments of astonishment and awe; and the same reflections arise upon the sight even of the enormous masses of marble ruins which are spread upon the area of the temple. Such scattered fragments will soon constitute the sole remains of the Temple of Minerva."] 2 We can all feel, or imagine, the regret with which the ruins of cities, once the capitals of empires, are beheld: the reflections suggested by such objects are too trite to require recapitulation. But never did the littleness of man, and the vanity of his very best virtues, of patriotism to exalt, and of valour to defend his country, appear more conspicuous than in the record of what Athens was, and the certainty of what she now is. This theatre of contention between mighty factions, of the struggles of orators, the exaltation and deposition of tyrants, the triumph and punishment of generals, is now become a scene of petty intrigue and perpetual disturbance, between the bickering agents of certain British nobility and gentry. The wild foxes, the owls and serpents in the ruins of Babylon," were surely less degrading than such inhabitants. The Turks have the plea of conquest for their tyranny, and the Greeks have only suffered the fortune of war, incidental to the bravest; but how are the mighty fallen, when two painters contest the privilege of plundering the Parthenon, and triumph in turn, according to the tenor of each succeeding firman! Sylla could but punish, Philip subdue, and Xerxes burn Athens, but it remained for the paltry antiquarian, and his despicable agents, to render her contemptible as himself and his pursuits. The Parthenon, before its destruction in part, by fire during the Venetian siege, had been a temple, a III. Son of the morning, rise! approach you' 1 Come - but molest not yon defenceless u Look on this spot - a nation's sepulchre Abode of gods, whose shrines no longer b Even gods must yield-religions take the 'Twas Jove's 'tis Mahomet's-and oth Will rise with other years, till man shall I Vainly his incense soars, his victim bleed Poor child of Doubt and Death, whose hop on reeds. 3 IV. Bound to the earth, he lifts his eye to he Is't not enough, unhappy thing! to know Thou art? Is this a boon so kindly give That being, thou would'st be again, and Thou know'st not, reck'st not to what re On earth no more, but mingled with the Still wilt thou dream on future joy and Regard and weigh yon dust before it flies That little urn saith more than thousand h V. Or burst the vanish'd Hero's lofty moun Far on the solitary shore he sleeps: 5 He fell, and falling nations mourn'd arou But now not one of saddening thousands Nor warlike worshipper his vigil keeps Where demi-gods appear'd, as records tell Remove yon skull from out the scatter'd Is that a temple where a God may dwell Why ev'n the worm at last disdains her shat church, and a mosque. In each point of view it of regard: it changed its worshippers; but still it of worship thrice sacred to devotion: its violatio sacrifice. But "Man, proud man, Drest in a little brief authority, 3 [In the original MS. we find the following and the five following stanzas, which had been publication, but was afterwards withdrawn. says the poet, "that it might be considered rather than a defence of religion:"-" In this age of t the puritan and priest have changed places, and Catholic is visited with the sins of his fathers generations far beyond the pale of the cominandi of opinion in these stanzas will, doubtless, meet contemptuous anathema. But let it be rememb spirit they breathe is desponding, not sneering that he who has seen the Greek and Moslem contending for mastery over the former shrines who has left in his own, Pharisees, thank they are not like publicans and sinners, and theirs, abhorring the heretics, who have holpen need, will be not a little bewildered, and b that as only one of them can be right, they may, be wrong. With regard to morals, and the ell on mankind, it appears, from all historical testi had less effect in making them love their neight ducing that cordial Christian abhorrence betwee schismatics. The Turks and Quakers are the if an Intidel pays his heratch to the former, he when, and where he pleases; and the mild ten demeanour of the latter, make their lives ti mentary on the Sermon on the Mount."] [“Still wilt thou harp." — MS.] 5 It was not always the custom of the Greek dead; the greater Ajax, in particular, was Almost all the chiefs became gods after thei he was indeed neglected, who had not annual tomb, or festivals in honour of his memory by as Achilles, Brasidas, &c., and at last even A death was as heroic as his life was infamous. gal MS., for this magnificent stanza, we find - me, charlish Priest! that I ***** # thy phantasy: verer D an unknown sea, mburg a happier tenants there; Tad to prove a Sadducer; pan of Paradise, thou know'st not where, arts wes, to bad thine erring brother share."] --- *note this stanza at Newstead, in October, the death of his Cambridge friend, young * 44. g” be says, "the sixth, within four Sənə də and relations that I have lost between "! - August." See post, Hours of Idleness, X. Here let me sit upon this massy stone, 3 The marble column's yet unshaken base; Here, son of Saturn! was thy fav'rite throne: + Mightiest of many such! Hence let me trace The latent grandeur of thy dwelling-place. It may not be nor ev'n can Fancy's eye Restore what Time hath labour'd to deface. Yet these proud pillars claim no passing sigh; Unmoved the Moslem sits, the light Greek carols by. XI. But who, of all the plunderers of yon fane The last, the worst, dull spoiler, who was he? XII. 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, 7 And never knew, till then, the weight of Despot's chains. XIII. 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 gen'rous aid her name endears, Tore down those remnants with a harpy's hand, Which envious Eld forbore, and tyrants left to stand. 8 4 The temple of Jupiter Olymplus, of which sixteen columns, entirely of marble, yet survive: originally there were one hundred and fifty. These columns, however, are by many supposed to have belonged to the Pantheon. 5 See Appendix to this Canto [A], for a note too long to be placed here. The ship was wrecked in the Archipelago. 6 ["Cold and accursed as his native coast."— MS.] 7 I cannot resist availing myself of the permission of my friend Dr. Clarke, whose name requires no comment with the public, but whose sanction will add tenfold weight to my testimony, to insert the following extract from a very obliging letter of his to me, as a note to the above lines: -"When the last of the metopes was taken from the Parthenon, and, in moving of it, great part of the superstructure with one of the triglyphs was thrown down by the workmen whom Lord Elgin employed, the Disdar, who beheld the mischief done to the building, took his pipe from his mouth, dropped a tear, and, in a supplicating tone of voice, said to Lusieri, Tiños! I was present." The Disdar alluded to was the father of the present Disdar. [After stanza xiii. the original MS. has the following:"Come, then, ye classic Thanes of each degree, Dark Hamilton and sullen Aberdeen, Come pilfer all the Pilgrim loves to see, All that yet consecrates the fading scene: Oh! better were it ye had never been, Nor ye, nor Elgin, nor that lesser wight, Than ye should bear one stone from wrong'd Athena's site. C XXVIII. ↑ = we the king, unvarying course, the track -1 trai, that never leaves a trace behind; rus we the calm, the gale, the change, the tack, 151 cm2 well known caprice of wave and wind; Pastatoys and sorrows sailors find, Cand in their winged wa-girt citadel; f the fair, the contrary, the kind, La brwars rise and fall and billows swell, m suae jound morn—lo, land! and all is well. 24 Beron's chief delights was, as he himself s journals, after bathing in some retired 1-self on a high rock above the sea, and there - gang upon the sky and the waters. "He San Sir Pcerton Brydges, as he wrote the Citrun pret. He could sleep, and very frequently ***, cm! up in as rough great coat, on the hard wh the wirats and the waves were roaring es every vide, and could subsist on a crust and a It would be difficult to persuade me, that he manners, and artificial in his habits entend poetry."] da a sam to have been the island of Calypso. —[" The # the bat tation assumed by poets to the nymph but wasted much discussion and variety of Some par it at Malta, and some at Goza." a man of this accomplished but eccentric lady, XXIX. But not in silence pass Calypso's isles, 2 For him who dared prefer a mortal bride : XXX. 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 may'st find a new Calypso there. Sweet Florence! could another ever share This wayward, loveless heart, it would be thine: But check'd 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. XXXI. Thus Harold deem'd, as on that lady's eye He look'd, 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 deem'd the little God his ancient sway was o'er. XXXII. Fair Florence 9 found, in sooth with some amaze, One who, 't was said, still sigh'd to all he saw, Withstand, unmoved, the lustre of her gaze, Which others hail'd with real or mimic awe, [law; Their hope, their doom, their punishment, their All that gay Beauty from her bondsmen claims: And much she marvell'd that a youth so raw Nor felt, nor feign'd at least, the oft-told flames, Which, though sometimes they frown, yet rarely anger dames. XXXIII. Little knew she that seeming marble heart, Now mask'd in silence or withheld by pride, Was not unskilful in the spoiler's art, 4 And spread its snares licentious far and wide; 5 Nor from the base pursuit had turn'd 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. whose acquaintance the poet formed at Malta, see Miscellaneous Poems, September, 1809, "To Florence." "In one so imaginative as Lord Byron, who, while he infused so much of his life into his poetry, mingled also not a little of poetry with his life, it is difficult," says Moore, "in unravelling the texture of his feelings, to distinguish at all times between the fanciful and the real. His description here, for instance, of the unmoved and loveless heart,' with which he contemplated even the charms of this attractive person, is wholly at variance with the statements in many of his letters; and, above all, with one of the most graceful of his lesser poems, addressed to this same lady, during a thunder-storm on his road to Zitza."] [Against this line it is sufficient to set the poet's own declaration, in 1821: -“ I am not a Joseph, nor a Scipio, but I can safely affirm, that I never in my life seduced any woman"] ["We have here another instance of his propensity to |