Poised by the flood, e'en on the height The foliage in which Fame, the eagle, Ebbs to its depths. — Inheritor of glory, Conceived in darkness, born in blood, and nourished With tears and toil, thou seest the mortal throes Her built acrie, while Dominion whelped below. The storm is in its branches, and the frost Is on its leaves, and the blank deep expects Oblivion on oblivion, spoil on spoil, Of that whose birth was but the same. Ruin on ruin :-Thou art slow, my son: The Anarchs of the world of darkness The Past keep A throne for thee, round which thing empire lies Boundless and mute; and for thy sub jects thou, Like us, shalt rule the ghosts of murdered life, The phantoms of the powers who rul thee now Mutinous passions, and conflicting fears And hopes that sate themselves on dus and die! Stript of their mortal strength, as tho of thine. Islam must fall, but we will reign to gether Over its ruins in the world of death :And if the trunk be dry, yet shall th seed Unfold itself even in the shape of that Which gathers birth in its decay. Woe When I arose, like shapeless crags and To the destroyer, woe to the destroyed Her consummation? Phantom. Ask the cold pale Hour, Rich in reversion of impending death, When he shall fall upon whose ripe gray hairs Sit Care, and Sorrow, and InfirmityThe weight which Crime, whose wings are plumed with years, Leaves in his flight from ravaged heart to heart Over the heads of men, under which burthen They bow themselves unto the grave: fond wretch ! He leans upon his crutch, and talks of years To come, and how in hours of youth renewed He will renew lost joys, and-Voice without. Victory! Victory! [The Phantom vanishes. Mahmud. What sound of the importunate earth has broken My mighty trance? Vexed by the wise mad talk of the old Dare not to prey beneath the crescent's Jew, light. Have shaped itself these shadows of its Impale the remnant of the Greeks! It matters not!-for nought we see or Violate! make their flesh cheaper than dream, Possess, or lose, or grasp at, can be worth dust! Semichorus II. Thou voice which art More than it gives or teaches. Come The herald of the ill in splendour hid! what may, The future must become the past, and 1 As they were to whom once this present hour, Thou echo of the hollow heart Of monarchy, bear me to thine abode When desolation flashes o'er a world destroyed: This gloomy crag of time to which I Oh, bear me to those isles of jagged cloud cling, Seemed an Elysian isle of peace and joy Which float like mountains on the earthquake, mid The momentary oceans of the lightning, At length they wept aloud, and cried, Or to some toppling promontory proud Of solid tempest whose black pyramid, Riven, overhangs the founts intensely brightning Of those dawn-tinted deluges of fire When heaven and earth are light, and "The Sea! the Sca!" Through exile, persecution, and despair, Rome was, and young Atlantis shall become The wonder, or the terror, or the tomb Of all whose step wakes Power lulled in her savage lair: But Greece was as a hermit child. Whose fairest thoughts and limbs were built To woman's growth, by dreams so mild, She knew not pain or guilt; Ho, there! bring torches, sharpen those | And now, O Victory, blush! and Empire red stakes, These chains are light, fitter for slaves and poisoners tremble When ye desert the freeIf Greece must be Than Greeks. Kill! plunder! burn! A wreck, yet shall its fragments re unbefriended, Semichorus II. If thou canst veil thy lie-consuming Our dead shall be the seed of their mirror Before the dazzled eyes of Error, Alas for thee! Image of the Above. Semichorus II. Repulse, with plumes from conquest torn, Led the ten thousand from the limits of decay, Our survivors be the shadow of their pride, Our adversity a dream to pass away— Their dishonour a remembrance to abide! Voice without. Victory! Victory! The bought Briton sends Through many an hostile Anarchy !] The keys of ocean to the Islamite.— the morn Now shall the blazon of the cross be veiled, And British skill directing Othman might, Thunder-strike rebel victory. Oh, keep holy This jubilee of unrevengèd blood! Kill! crush! despoil! Let not a Greek escape! Semichorus I. Darkness has dawned in the East On the noon of time: The death-birds descend to their feast, From the hungry clime. Let Freedom and Peace flee far To a sunnier strand, And follow Love's folding star Semichorus II. The young moon has fed With the sunset's fire: But the night is not born; And, like loveliness panting with wild desire While it trembles with fear and delight, Hesperus flies from awakening night, And pants in its beauty and speed with light Fast flashing, soft, and bright. Thou beacon of love! thou lamp of the free! Guide us far, far away, To climes where now veiled by the ardour of day Thou art hidden From waves on which weary noon, Faints in her summer swoon, Between Kingless continents sinless as Eden, Around mountains and islands inviolably Prankt on the sapphire sea. Semichorus I. Through the sunset of hope, Like the shapes of a dream, What Paradise islands of glory gleam! Beneath Heaven's cope, Their shadows more clear float by--The sound of their oceans, the light of their sky, The music and fragrance their solitudes breathe Burst, like morning on dream, or like Heaven on death Through the walls of our prison; And Greece, which was dead, is arisen! Chorus. 'The world's great age begins anew, The golden years return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn: Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam, Like wrecks of a dissolving dream. A brighter Hellas rears its mountains A new Peneus rolls his fountains Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep. A loftier Argo cleaves the main, And loves, and weeps, and dies. A new Ulysses leaves once more Calypso for his native shore. Oh, write no more the tale of Troy, If earth Death's scroll must be! Nor mix with Laian rage the joy Which dawns upon the free: Although a subtler Sphinx renew Riddles of death Thebes never knew. Another Athens shall arise, And to remoter time Bequeath, like sunset to the skies, The splendour of its prime; And leave, if nought so bright may live, All earth can take or Heaven can give. Saturn and Love their long repose Shall burst, more bright and good Than all who fel, than One who rose, Than many unsubdued: Not gold, not blood, their altar dowers, But votive tears and symbol flowers. Oh, cease! must hate and death return? Cease! must men kill and die? The world is weary of the past, NOTES the moral attributes of his nature, has called us out of non-existence, and inflicting on us the misery of the comm sion of error, should superadd that of t punishment and the privations conseque upon it, still would remain inexplica and incredible. That there is a true si tion of the riddle, and that in our prese state that solution is unattainable by are propositions which may be regard as equally certain: meanwhile, as it is t province of the poet to attach himself those ideas which exalt and ennol humanity, let him be permitted to hi conjectured the condition of that futur towards which we are all impelled by inextinguishable thirst for immorta Until better arguments can be produc (1) The quenchless ashes of Milan [p. 434]. than sophisms which disgrace the cas MILAN was the centre of the resistance of the Lombard league against the Austrian tyrant. Frederic Barbarossa burnt the city to the ground, but liberty lived in its ashes, and it rose like an exhalation from its ruin. See Sismondi's Histoire des Républiques Italiennes, a book which has done much towards awakening the Italians to an imitation of their great ancestors. (2) The Chorus [p. 434]. The popular notions of Christianity are represented in this chorus as true in their relation to the worship they superseded, and that which in all probability they will supersede, without considering their merits in a relation more universal. The first stanza contrasts the immortality of the living and thinking beings which inhabit the planets, and to use a common and inadequate phrase, clothe themselves in matter, with the transience of the noblest manifestations of the external world. this desire itself must remain the strong The Greek Patriarch after having b compelled to fulminate an anathe against the insurgents was put to death the Turks. Fortunately the Greeks have been tau that they cannot buy security by degra tion, and the Turks, though equally cr are less cunning than the smooth-fa tyrants of Europe. As to the anather his Holiness might as well have thr his mitre at Mount Athos for any ef The chiefs of that it produced. Greeks are almost all men of compreh sion and enlightened views on religion politics. (4) The freedman of a western porti [P. 443]. The concluding verses indicate a pro- A Greek who had been Lord Byro gressive state of more or less exalted exist- servant commands the insurgents in Att ence, according to the degree of perfection This Greek, Lord Byron informs which every distinct intelligence may have though a poet and an enthusiastic patr attained. Let it not be supposed that I gave him rather the idea of a timid a mean to dogmatise upon a subject, con-unenterprising person. It appears t cerning which all men are equally ignorant, or that I think the Gordian knot of the origin of evil can be disentangled by that or any similar assertions. The received hypothesis of a Being resembling men in circumstances make men what they a and that we all contain the germ o degree of degradation or of greatn whose connection with our character determined by events. |