But turn to gaze again, and find anew For them the voice of festal mirth Some charm that well rewards another view. August, 1814. TO BELSHAZZAR. Crown'd and anointed from on high; Go! dash the roses from thy brow Grey hairs but poorly wreathe with them; Youth's garlands misbecome thee now, More than thy very diadem, Oh! early in the balance weigh'd, ELEGIAC STANZAS ON THE DEATH OF A mourner o'er the humblest grave; For them is Sorrow's purest sigh A tomb is theirs on every page, For them bewail, to them belong. [This gallant officer fell in August, 1814, in his twentyninth year, whilst commanding, on shore, a party belonging to his ship, the Menelaus, and animating them, in storming the American camp near Baltimore. He was Lord Byron's first cousin; but they had never met since boyhood.] 2 [These verses were given by Lord Byron to Mr. Power, of the Strand, who has published them, with very beautiful music by Sir John Stevenson."I feel merry enough to send you a sad song. An event, the death of poor Dorset, (see antè, p. 384.) and the recollection of what I once felt, and ought to have felt now, but could not-set me pondering, and finally into the train of thought which you have in your hands. I wrote them with a view to your setting them, and as a present to Power, if he would accept the words, and you did not think yourself degraded, for once in a way, by mar rying them to music. I don't care what Power says to secure the property of the song, so that it is not complimentary to me, nor any thing about condescending' or -both vile phrases,' as Polonius says."-Lord Byron to Mr. Moore.] noble author' !["Do you remember the lines I sent you early last year? I don't wish (like Mr. Fitzgerald) to claim the character of Vates,' in all its translations, but were they not a little prophetic ? I mean those beginning, There's not a joy the world can give,' &c, on which I pique myself as being the fruest, though the most melancholy, I ever wrote." — Byron Letters, March, 1816.] * " I can forgive the rogue for utterly falsifying every line of mine de-which I take to be the last and uttermost stretch of human magnanimity. Do you remember the story of a certain abbé, who wrote a treatise on the Swedish constitution, and proved it indissoluble and eternal? Just as he had corrected the last sheet, news came that Gustavus the Third had destroyed this immortal government. Sir,' quoth the albe, 'the King of Sweden may overthrow the constitution, that not my book !!! I think of the abbé, but not with him. Making every allowance for talent and most consummate laring, there is, after all, a good deal in luck or destiny. He might have been stopped by our frigates, or wrecked in the Gulf of Lyons, which is particularly tempestuous—or—a ODE FROM THE FRENCH. I. -- We do not curse thee, Waterloo ! As then shall shake the world with wonder As o'er heaven shall then be bright'ning! thousand things. But he is certainly fortune's favourite.". Byron Letters, March, 1815.] 3 See Rev. chap. viii. v. 7, &c. "The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood," &c. 8. "And the second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea; and the third part of the sea became blood," &c. v. 10. "And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp; and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters." 11. And the name of the star is called Wormwood; and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter." 4 ["Poor dear Murat, what an end! His white plume used to be a rallying point in battle, like Henry the Fourth's. He refused a confessor and a bandage; so would neither suffer his soul nor body to be bandaged.” — Byron Letters] 5 Murat's remains are said to have been torn from the grave and burnt. Shone and shiver'd fast around thee Once - as the Moon sways o'er the tide, So moved his heart upon our foes. There be sure was Murat charging! O'er glories gone the invaders march, With her heart in her voice; But, her hand on her sword, France hath twice too well been taught Hearts and hands in one great cause Unto all beneath his heaven, With their breath, and from their birth, Though Guilt would sweep it from the earth; With a fierce and lavish hand Scattering nations' wealth like sand; Pouring nations' blood like water, In imperial seas of slaughter! V. But the heart and the mind, And the voice of mankind, Shall arise in communion And who shall resist that proud union ? ["Talking of politics, as Caleb Quotem says, pray look at the conclusion of my Ode on Waterloo,' written in the year 1815, and, comparing it with the Duke de Berri's catastrophe in 1820, tell me if I have not as good a right to the character of Vates,' in both senses of the word, as Fitzgerald and Coleridge? Crimson tears will follow yet;' and have they not?"- Byron Letters, 1820.] "All wept, but particularly Savary, and a Polish officer FROM THE FRENCH. MUST thou go, my glorious Chief, 2 Sever'd from thy faithful few ? Who can tell thy warrior's grief, Maddening o'er that long adieu ? Woman's love, and friendship's zeal, Dear as both have been to me — What are they to all I feel, With a soldier's faith for thee ? Idol of the soldier's soul! First in fight, but mightiest now : Many could a world control; Thee alone no doom can bow. By thy side for years I dared Death; and envied those who fell, When their dying shout was heard, Blessing him they served so well. 3 Would that I were cold with those, Since this hour I live to see; When the doubts of coward foes Scarce dare trust a man with thee, Dreading each should set thee free! Oh! although in dungeons pent, All their chains were light to me, Gazing on thy soul unbent. Would the sycophants of him Now so deaf to duty's prayer, Were his borrow'd glories dim, In his native darkness share? Were that world this hour his own, All thou calmly dost resign, Could he purchase with that throne Hearts like those which still are thine? My chief, my king, my friend, adieu! Never did I droop before; Never to my sovereign sue, As his foes I now implore: All I ask is to divide Every peril he must brave; Sharing by the hero's side His fall, his exile, and his grave. ON THE STAR OF "THE LEGION OF HONOUR." FROM THE FRENCH. STAR of the brave!-- whose beam hath shed Souls of slain heroes form'd thy rays; who had been exalted from the ranks by Buonaparte. Tie clung to his master's knees; wrote a letter to Lord Keith. entreating permission to accompany him, even in the most menial capacity, which could not be admitted." 3" At Waterloo, one man was seen, whose left arm was shattered by a cannon ball, to wrench it off with the other, and throwing it up in the air, exclaimed to his comrades, Vive l'Empereur, jusqu'à la mort !' There were many other instances of the like: this, however, you may depend on as true."-Private Letter from Brussels. The music of thy martial sphere Like lava roll'd thy stream of blood, One tint was of the sunbeam's dyes; Star of the brave! thy ray is pale, And Freedom hallows with her tread NAPOLEON'S FAREWELL. PROM THE PRENCH. FAREWELL to the Land, where the gloom of my Glory The last single Captive to millions in war. The tricolour. * [In the original MS." A Dream."] [In this poem Lord Byron has abandoned the art, so peculiarly his own. of showing the reader where his purpose tenis, and has contented himself with presenting a mass of powerful aleas unarranged, and the meaning of which it is not easy to attain. A succession of terrible images is placed before us, fitting and mixing, and disengaging themselves, as In the dream of a feverish man-chimeras dire, to whose exIstence the mind refuses credit, which confound and weary the ordinary reader, and baille the comprehension, even of those more accustomed to the flights of a poetic muse. The adject is the progress of utter darkness, until it becomes, in Shakspeare's phrase, the "burier of the dead ;" and the assemblage of terrific ideas which the poet has placed before us only Oh! for the veteran hearts that were wasted Then turn thee and call on the Chief of thy choice! ENDORSEMENT TO THE DEED OF SEPAR- A YEAR ago you swore, fond she! DARKNESS. 2 I HAD a dream, which was not all a dream. 3 And men were gather'd round their blazing homes The flashes fell upon them; some lay down fail in exciting our terror from the extravagance of the plan. To speak plainly, the framing of such phantasms is a dangerous employment for the exalted and teeming imagination of such a poet as Lord Byron, whose Pegasus ever required rather a bridle than a spur. The waste of boundless space into which they lead the poet, the neglect of precision which such themes may render habitual, make them, in respect to poetry, what mysticism is to religion. The meaning of the poet, as he asce ds upon cloudy wing, becomes the shadow only of a thought, and having cluded the comprehension of others, necessarily ends by escaping from that of the author himself. The strength of poctical conception, and the beauty of diction, bestowed upon such prolusions, is as much thrown away as the colours of a painter, could he take a cloud of mist, or a wreath of smoke, for his canvass.- SIR WALTER Scorr.] The pall of a past world; and then again And, terrified, did flutter on the ground, Of famine fed upon all entrails-men Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh; And they were enemies: they met beside The dying embers of an altar-place Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things For an unholy usage; they raked up, And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath Blew for a little life, and made a flame Which was a mockery; then they lifted up Each other's aspects. - saw, and shriek'd, and died- And their masts fell down piecemeal; as they dropp'd ["Darkness" is a grand and gloomy sketch of the supposed consequences of the final extinction of the Sun and the heavenly bodies: executed, undoubtedly, with great and fearful force, but with something of German exaggeration, and a fantastical solution of incidents. The very conception is terrible above all conception of known calamity, and is too oppressive to the imagination to be contemplated with pleasure, even in the faint reflection of poetry. JEFFREY.] 2 [On the sheet containing the original draught of these lines, Lord Byron has written:-"The following poem (as most that I have endeavoured to write) is founded on a fact; and this detail is an attempt at a serious imitation of the style of a great poet-its beauties and its defects: I say the style; for the thoughts I claim as my own. In this, if there be any thing ridiculous, let it be attributed to me, at least as much as to Mr. Wordsworth; of whom there can exist few greater admirers than myself. I have blended what I would deem to be the beauties as well as defects of his style; and it ought to be remembered, that, in such things, whether there be praise or dispraise, there is always what is called a compliinent, however unintentional."] And the clouds perish'd! Darkness had no need Of aid from them She was the Universe. ' Diodati, July, 1916 CHURCHILL'S GRAVE? I STOOD beside the grave of him who blazed The Gardener of that ground, why it might be That for this plant strangers his memory task'd Through the thick deaths of balf a century? And thus he answer'd" Well, I do not know Why frequent travellers turn to pilgrims so; He died before my day of Sextonship, And I had not the digging of this grave." I know not what of honour and of light Your honour pleases," then most pleased I shook Diodati, 1816 3 ["The Grave of Churchill might have called from Lord Byron a deeper commemoration; for, though they generally differed in character and genius, there was a resemblance be tween their history and character. The satire of Churchill flowed with a more profuse, though not a more embittered, stream; while, on the other hand, he cannot be compared to Lord Byron in point of tenderness or imagination. But both these poets held themselves above the opinion of the world, and both were followed by the fame and popularity which they seemed to despise. The writings of both exhibit an inborn, though sometimes ill-regulated, generosity of mind, and a spirit of proud independence, frequently pushed to extremes. Both carried their hatred of hypocrisy beyond the verge of prudence, and indulged their vein of satire to the borders of licentiousness. Both died in the flower of their age in a foreign land."- SIR WALTER SCOTT.Churchill died at Boulogne, November 4. 1764, in the thirty-third year of his age." Though his associates obtained Christian burial for him, by bringing the body to Dover, where it was interred in the old cemetery which once belonged to the collegiate church of St. Martin, they inscribed upon his tombstone, in |