Her aërie, while Dominion whelped below. Ruin on ruin :-Thou art slow, my son; The Anarchs of the world of darkness keep A throne for thee, round which thine empire lies Boundless and mute; and for thy subjects thou, 881 Like us, shalt rule the ghosts of murdered life, The phantoms of the powers who rule thee now Mutinous passions, and conflicting fears, And hopes that sate themselves on dust and die! Stripped of their mortal strength, as thou of thine. : 890 Islam must fall, but we will reign together MAHMUD. Spirit, woe to all! Woe to the wronged and the avenger! Woe plish Her consummation? 900 PHANTOM. Ask the cold pale Hour, Rich in reversion of impending death, The 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 910 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. VOICE without. Victory! Victory! MAHMUD. Weak lightning before darkness! poor faint smile Of dying Islam! Voice which art the response Of hollow weakness! Do I wake and live? Were there such things, or may the unquiet brain, Vexed by the wise mad talk of the old Jew, Have shaped itself these shadows of its fear? 920 It matters not!-for naught we see or dream, VOICE without. Shout in the jubilee of death! The Greeks 929 Round which the kingly hunters of the earth Stand smiling. Anarchs, ye whose daily food Are curses, groans, and gold, the fruit of death From Thule to the girdle of the world, Come, feast! the board groans with the flesh of men; The cup is foaming with a nation's blood, Famine and Thirst await! eat, drink, and die! SEMICHORUS I. Victorious Wrong, with vulture scream, 940 Salutes the risen sun, pursues the flying day!, I saw her, ghastly as a tyrant's dream, Perch on the trembling pyramid of night, Beneath which earth and all her realms pavilioned lay In visions of the dawning undelight. VOICE without. Victory! Victory! Russia's famished eagles Dare not to prey beneath the crescent's light. Impale the remnant of the Greeks! despoil! 950 Violate! make their flesh cheaper than dust! SEMICHORUS II. Thou voice which art The herald of the ill in splendour hid! When desolation flashes o'er a world destroyed: Oh, bear me to those isles of jaggèd cloud Which float like mountains on the earthquake, 'mid The momentary oceans of the lightning, Of those dawn-tinted deluges of fire When heaven and earth are light, and only light VOICE without. Victory! Victory! Austria, Russia, England, And that tame serpent, that poor shadow, France, Cry peace, and that means death when monarchs speak. Ho, there! bring torches, sharpen those red stakes, 970 These chains are light, fitter for slaves and poisoners Than Greeks. Kill! plunder! burn! let none remain. SEMICHORUS I. Alas! for Liberty! If numbers, wealth, or unfulfilling years, Torments, or contumely, or the sneers Can break the heart where it abides. Alas! if Love, whose smile makes this obscure world splendid, 980 Can change with its false times and tides, Alas for Love! And Truth, who wanderest lone and unbefriended, If thou canst veil thy lie-consuming mirror SEMICHORUS II. Repulse, with plumes from conquest torn, Led the ten thousand from the limits of the morn 990 Through many an hostile Anarchy! At length they wept aloud, and cried, "the Sea! the Sea!" 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 To woman's growth, by dreams so mild, |