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Of Lebanon and the Syrian wilderness
Are in revolt-Damascus, Hems, Aleppo,
Tremble-the Arab menaces Medina ;
The Ethiop has intrench'd himself in Sennaar,
And keeps the Egyptian rebel well employ'd:
Who denies homage, claims investiture
As price of tardy aid. Persia demands
The cities on the Tigris, and the Georgians
Refuse their living tribute. Crete and Cyprus,
Like mountain-twins that from each other's veins
Catch the volcano-fire and earthquake spasm,
Shake in the general fever. Through the city,
Like birds before a storm the santons shriek,
And prophecyings horrible and new
Are heard among the crowd; that sea of men
Sleeps on the wrecks it made, breathless and still.
A Devise, learn'd in the koran, preaches
That it is written how the sins of Islam
Must raise up a destroyer even now.
The Greeks expect a Savior from the west,*
Who shall not come, men say, in clouds and glory,
But in the omnipresence of that spirit
In which all live and are. Ominous signs
Are blazon'd broadly on the noonday sky;
One saw a red cross stamp'd upon the sun;
It has rain'd blood; and monstrous births declare
The secret wrath of Nature and her Lord.
The army encamp'd upon the Cydaris
Was roused last night by the alarm of battle,
And saw two hosts conflicting in the air,-
The shadows doubtless of the unborn time,
Cast on the mirror of the night. While yet
The fight hung balanced, there arose a storm
Which swept the phantoms from among the stars.
At the third watch the spirit of the plague
Was heard abroad flapping among the tents:
Those who relieved watch found the sentinels dead.
The last news from the camp is, that a thousand
Have sicken'd, and-
Enter a FOURTH MESSENGER.
And thou, pale ghost, dim shadow
Of some untimely rumor, speak!
FOURTH MESSENGER.
Fainting with toil, cover'd with foam and blood; He stood, he says, upon Clelonites'
Promontory, which o'erlooks the isles that groan Under the Briton's frown, and all their waters Then trembling in the splendor of the moon, When as the wandering clouds unveil'd or hid Her boundless light, he saw two adverse fleets Stalk through the night in the horizon's glimmer,
Mingling fierce thunders and sulphureous gleams,
And smoke which strangled every infant wind
That soothed the silver clouds through the deep air.
At length the battle slept, but the Sirocco
Awoke, and drove his flock of thunder-clouds
Over the sea-horizon, blotting out
All objects-save that in the faint moon-glimpse
He saw, or dream'd he saw the Turkish admiral
And two the loftiest of our ships of war,
With the bright image of the queen of heaven,
Who hid, perhaps, her face for grief, reversed;
And the abhorred cross-
O Slavery! thou frost of the world's prime, Killing its flowers and leaving its thorns bare
* It is reported that this Messiah had arrived at a sea. port near Lacedæmon in an American brig. The asso-Thy touch has stamp'd these limbs with crime,
ciation of names and ideas is irresistibly ludicrous, but the prevalence of such a rumor strongly marks the state of popular enthusiasm in Greece.
These brows thy branding garland bear; But the free heart, the impassive soul, Scorn thy control!
Citadels and marts, and they
Who live and die there, have been ours, And may be thine, and must decay;
But Greece and her foundations are
Built below the tide of war,
Based on the crystalline sea
Of thought and its eternity;
Her citizens' imperial spirits
Rule the present from the past;
On all this world of men inherits
Their seal is set.
Hear ye the blast, Whose Orphic thunder thrilling calls From ruin her Titanian walls? Whose spirit shakes the sapless bones
Of Slavery? Argos, Corinth, Crete, Hear, and from their mountain thrones The demons and the nymphs repeat The harmony.
SEMICHORUS I. I hear! I hear!
SEMICHORUS II.
The world's eyeless charioteer,
Destiny, is hurrying by!
What faith is crush'd, what empire bleeds
Beneath her earthquake-footed steeds?
What eagle-winged victory sits
At her right hand? what shadow flits
Before what splendor rolls behind?
Ruin and Renovation cry,
Who but we?
SEMICHORUS I.
I hear! I hear!
The hiss as of a rushing wind,
The roar as of an ocean foaming,
The thunder as of earthquake coming,
I hear! I hear!
The crash as of an empire falling,
The shrieks as of a people calling
Mercy! Mercy!-How they thrill!
Then a shout of "Kill! kill! kill!"
And then a small still voice, thus-
Revenge and wrong bring forth their kind, The foul cubs like their parents are,
Their den is in their guilty mind,
And Conscience feeds them with despair.
But raised above thy fellow-men
By thought, as I by power.
Thou art an adept in the difficult lore
Of Greek and Frank philosophy; thou numberest The flowers, and thou measurest the stars;
Thou severest element from element;
Thy spirit is present in the past, and sees
The birth of this old world through all its cycles
Of desolation and of loveliness;
And when man was not, and how man became
The monarch and the slave of this low sphere,
And all its narrow circles-it is much.
I honor thee, and would be what thou art
Were I not what I am; but the unborn hour,
Cradled in fear and hope, conflicting storms,
Who shall unveil? Nor thou, nor I, nor any
Mighty or wise. I apprehend not
What thou hast taught me, but I now perceive
That thou art no interpreter of dreams,
Thou dost not own that art, device, or God,
Can make the future present-let it come!
Moreover, thou disdainest us and ours;
Thou art as God, whom thou contemplatest.
Disdain thee?-not the worm beneath my feet!
The Fathomless has care for meaner things
Than thou canst dream, and has made pride for
those
Who would be what they may not, or would seem
That which they are not. Sultan! talk no more
Of thee and me, the future and the past;
But look on that which cannot change-the one
The unborn, and undying. Earth and ocean,
Space, and the isles of life or light that gem
The sapphire floods of interstellar air,
This firmament pavilion'd upon chaos,
With all its cressets of immortal fire,
Whose outwalls, bastion'd impregnably
Against the escape of boldest thoughts, repels them
As Calpe the Atlantic clouds-this whole
Of suns, and worlds, and men, and beasts, and flowers.
With all the silent or tempestuous workings
By which they have been, are, or cease to be,
Is but a vision;-all that it inherits
Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams;
Thought is its cradle and its grave, nor less
The future and the past are idle shadows
Of thought's eternal flight-they have no being;
Naught is but that it feels itself to be.
What meanest thou? thy words stream like a tempest Of dazzling mist within my brain-they shake
The earth on which I stand, and hang like night
On Heaven above me. What can they avail?
They cast on all things, surest, brightest, best,
Doubt, insecurity, astonishment.
• Mistake me not! All is contain'd in each,
Dodona's forest to an acorn's cup,
Is that which has been or will be, to that
Which is the absent to the present. Thought
Alone, and its quick elements, Will, Passion,
Reason, Imagination, cannot die ;
They are what that which they regard appears,
The stuff whence mutability can weave
All that it hath dominion o'er,-worlds, worms,
Empires, and superstitions. What has thought
To do with time, or place, or circumstance?
Wouldst thou behold the future?-ask and have!
Knock and it shall be open'd-look, and lo!
The coming age is shadow'd on the past
As on a glass.
Wild, wilder thoughts convulse
My spirit-Did not Mahomet the Second
Win Stamboul?
Thou wouldst ask that giant spirit
The written fortunes of thy house and faith.
Thou wouldst cite one out of the grave to tell
How what was born in blood must die.
A far whisper-
Terrible silence.
The mingled battle-cry-ha! hear I not
EV TOUT VIKη. Allah, Illah, Allah!
The sulphurous mist is raised-thou see'st
As of two mountains, in the wall of Stamboul;
And in that ghastly breach the Islamites,
Like giants on the ruins of a world,
Stand in the light of sunrise. In the dust
Glimmers a kingless diadem, and one
Of regal port has cast himself beneath
The stream of war. Another, proudly clad
In golden arms, spurs a Tartarian barb
Into the gap, and with his iron mace
Directs the torrent of that tide of men,
And seems-he is-Mahomet.
Is but the ghost of thy forgotten dream;
A dream itself, yet less, perhaps, than that
Thou call'st reality. Thou mayst behold
How cities, on which empire sleeps enthroned,
Poised by the flood, e'en on the height thou holdest,
Bow their tower'd crests to mutability.
Thou mayst now learn how the full tide of power
Ebbs to its depths.-Inheritor of glory,
Conceived in darkness, born in blood, and nourish'd
With tears and toil, thou seest the mortal throes
Thy words Of that whose birth was but the same. The Past
Now stands before thee like an Incarnation
Of the To-come; yet wouldst thou commune with
That portion of thyself which was ere thou
Didst start for this brief race whose crown is death,
Dissolve with that strong faith and fervent passion
Which call'd it from the uncreated deep,
Yon cloud of war, with its tempestuous phantoms
Of raging death; and draw with mighty will
The imperial shade hither.
As of the asault of an imperial city,
The hiss of inextinguishable fire,
The roar of giant cannon;-the earthquaking
Fall of vast bastions and precipitous towers,
The shock of crags shot from strange enginery,
The clash of wheels, and clang of armed hoofs,
And crash of brazen mail, as of the wreck
Of adamantine mountains-the mad blast
Of trumpets, and the neigh of raging steeds,
And shrieks of women whose thrill jars the blood,
And one sweet laugh, most horrible to hear,
As of a joyous infant waked and playing
With its dead mother's breast; and now more loud
For the vision of Mahmud of the taking of Constantinople in 1445, see Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. xii. p. 223. The manner of the invocation of the spirit of Mahomet the Second will be censured as overdrawn. I could easily have made the Jew a regular conjuror, and the phantom an ordinary ghost. I have preferred to represent the Jew as disclaiming all pretension, or even belief, in supernatural agency, and as
tempting Mahmud to that state of mind in which ideas may be supposed to assume the force of sensations, through the confusion of thought with the objects of thought, and the excess of passion animating the creations of imagination.
It is a sort of natural magic, susceptible of being exercised in a degree by any one who should have made himself master of the secret associations of another's thoughts.
Thence whither thou must go! The grave is fitter
To take the living, than give up the dead;
Yet has thy faith prevail'd, and I am here.
The heavy fragments of the power which fell
When I arose, like shapeless crags and clouds,
Hang round my throne on the abyss, and voices
Of strange lament soothe my supreme repose,
Wailing for glory never to return.—
A later empire nods in its decay;
The autumn of a greener faith is come,
And wolfish change, like winter, howls to strip
The foliage in which Fame, the eagle, built
Her aëry, while Dominion whelp'd 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,
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,
The phantoms of the powers who rule thee now—
Like us, shall rule the ghosts of murder'd life,
Mutinous passions, and conflicting fears,
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,
Vex'd by the wise mad talk of the old Jew,
Have shaped itself these shadows of its fear?
It matters not!-for naught we see or dream,
Possess, or lose, or grasp at, can be worth
More than it gives or teaches. Come what may,
The future must become the past, and I
As they were to whom once this present hour,
This gloomy crag of time to which I cling,
Seem'd an Elysian isle of peace and joy
Never to be attain'd.-I must rebuke
This drunkenness of triumph ere it die,
And dying, bring despair.-Victory!-poor slaves!
[Exit MAHMUD.
Shout in the jubilee of death! The Greeks
Are as a brood of lions in the net,
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
Torments, or contumely, or the sneers
Of erring judging men
Can break the heart where it abides.
Alas! if Love, whose smile makes this obscure more
splendid,
Can change, with its false times and tides,
Like hope and terror-
And Truth, who wanderest lone and unbefriended,
If thou canst veil thy lie-consuming mirror
Before the dazzled eyes of error.
Alas for thee! Image of the above.
Repulse, with plumes from conquest torn,
Led the ten thousand from the limits of the morn
Through many a 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 lull'd in her savage lair
But Greece was as a hermit child,
Whose fairest thoughts and limbs were built The music and fragrance their solitudes breathe,
To woman's growth by dreams so mild,
She knew not pain or guilt;
And now, O Victory, blush! and Empire, tremble,
When ye desert the free!
If Greece must be
A wreck, yet shall its fragments reassemble,
And build themselves again impregnably
In a diviner clime,
To Amphionic music, on some cape sublime,
Which frowns above the idle foam of Time.
Let the tyrants rule the desert they have made; Let the free possess the paradise they claim; Be the fortune of our fierce oppressors weigh'd With our ruin, our resistance, and our name!
Our dead shall be the seed of their decay,
Our survivors be the shadows of their pride,
Our adversity a dream to pass away-
Their dishonor a remembrance to abide.
Victory! Victory! The bought Briton sends
The keys of ocean to the Islamite.
Nor shall the blazon of the cross be veil'd,
And British skill directing Othman might,
Thunder-strike rebel victory. O keep holy
This jubilee of unrevenged blood!
Kill! crush! despoil! Let not a Greek escape!
Darkness has dawn'd 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
To the evening land!
SEMICHORUS II.
The young moon has fed
Her exhausted horn
With the sunset's fire:
The weak day is dead,
But the night is not born;
And, like loveliness panting with wild desire,
While it trembles with fear and delight,
Hesperus flies from awakening might,
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, veil'd by the ardor 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.
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,
Burst like morning on dreams, or like Heaven on death
Through the walls of our prison;
And Greece, which was dead, is arisen!
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
From waves serener far;
A new Peneus rolls its fountains
Against the morning-star.
Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep
Young Cyclads, on a sunnier deep;
A loftier Argos cleaves the main,
Fraught with a later prize;
Another Orpheus sings again,
And loves, and weeps, and dies.
A new Ulysses leaves once more
Calypso for his native shore.
Q 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 subtle sphinx renew
Riddles of death Thebes never knew,
Another Athens shall arise,
And to remoter time
Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,
The splendor of its prime;
And leave, if naught so bright may live,
All earth can take or heaven can give.
Saturn and Love their long reposet
Shall burst, more wise and good
Than all who fell, than one who rose,
Than many unwithstood
Not gold, nor blood, their altar dowers,
But native tears, and symbol flowers.
O cease! must hate and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn
Of bitter prophecy.
The world is weary of the past—
O might it die or rest at last!
The final chorus is indistinct and obscure as the event of the living drama whose arrival it foretells. Prophecies of wars, and rumor of wars, etc. may safely be made by poet or prophet in any age; but to anticipate, however darkly, a period of regeneration and happiness, is a more hazardous exercise of the faculty which bards possess or feign. I will remind the reader, "magno nec proximus intervallo," of Isaiah and Virgil, whose ardent spirits overleaping the actual reign of evil which we endure and bewail, already saw the possible and perhaps ap proaching state of society in which the "lion shall lie down with the lamb," and "omnis feret omnia tellus." Let these great names be my authority and excuse.
↑ Saturn and Love were among the deities of a real or imaginary state of innocence and happiness. All those who fell, or the Gods of Greece, Asia and Egypt, and the many unsubdued, or the monstrous objects of the idolatry of China, India, the Antarctic islands, and the native tribes of America, certainly have reigned over the understandings of men in conjunction or in succession, during periods in which all we know of evil has been in a state of portentous, and, until the revival of learning and the arts, perpetually increasing activity. The Grecian Gods seem indeed to have been personally more innocent, although it cannot be said that, as far as temperance and chastity are concerned, they gave very edifying examples. The horrors of the Mexican, the Peruvian, and the Indian superstitions are well known.
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