And from the windows o'er the walls
The sable web of mourning falls;
The King weeps as a woman o'er
His loss, for it is much and sore.
Woe is me, Alhama!
STANZAS FOR MUSIC. THEY say that Hope is happiness;
But genuine Love must prize the past, And Memory wakes the thoughts that bless: They rose the first-they set the last;
And all that Memory loves the most
Was once our only Hope to be,
And all that Hope adored and lost
Hath melted into Memory.
Alas! it is delusion all;
The future cheats us from afar,
Nor can we be what we recall,
Nor dare we think on what we are.
TO THOMAS MOORE.
My boat is on the shore,
And my bark is on the sea; But, before I go, Tom Moore, Here's a double health to thee! Here's a sigh to those who love me, And a smile to those who hate; And, whatever sky's above me, Here's a heart for every fate. Though the ocean roar around me, Yet it still shall bear me on; Though a desert should surround me, It hath springs that may be won. Were't the last drop in the well, As I gasp'd upon the brink, Ere my fainting spirit fell,
"Tis to thee that I would drink.
With that water, as this wine,
The libation I would pour
Should be-Peace with thine and mine, And a health to thee, Tom Moore.
TO SAMUEL ROGERS, ESQ.* ABSENT or present, still to thee, My friend, what magic spells belong! As all can tell, who share, like me,
In turn thy converse and thy song. But when the dreaded hour shall come, By Friendship ever deem'd too nigh, AndMEMORY o'er her Druid's tomb Shall weep that aught of thee can die, How fondly will she then repay Thy homage offer'd at her shrine, And blend, while ages roll away, Her name immortally with thine!
⚫ Written in a blank leaf of the 'Pleasures of Memory.'
ON THE BUST OF HELEN BY CANOVA.
IN this beloved marble view,
Above the works and thoughts of man,
What Nature could, but would not, do,
And beauty and Canova can!
Beyond imagination's power,
Beyond the Bard's defeated art,
With immortality her dower,
Behold the Helen of the heart!
SONG FOR THE LUDDITES.
As the Liberty lads o'er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
So we, boys, we
Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd!
When the web that we weave is complete,
And the shuttle exchanged for the sword,
We will fling the winding-sheet
O'er the despot at our feet,
And dye it deep in the gore he has pour'd.
Though black as his heart its hue,
Since his veins are corrupted to mud,
Yet this is the dew
Which the tree shall renew
Of Liberty, planted by Ludd!
What are you doing now, Oh Thomas Moore? Sighing or suing now, Rhyming or wooing now, Billing or cooing now,
Which, Thomas Moore? But the Carnival's coming, Oh Thomas Moore ! The Carnival's coming, Oh Thomas Moore ! Masking and humming, Fifing and drumming, Guitarring and strumming, Oh Thomas Moore !
TO MR MURRAY.
To hook the reader, you, John Murray,
Have publish'd'Anjou's Margaret,'
Which won't be sold off in a hurry
(At least, it has not been as yet);
And then, still further to bewilder 'em,
Without remorse, you set up 'Ilderim;'
So mind you don't get into debt,
Because as how, if you should fail,
These books would be but baddish bail.
And mind you do not let escape
These rhymes to Morning Post or Perry,
Which would be very treacherous-very,
And get me into such a scrape!
For, firstly, I should have to sally,
All in my little boat, against a Galley;
And, should I chance to slay the Assyrian wight, Have next to combat with the female knight.
And Sotheby, with his 'Orestes,'
(Which, by the by, the author's best is,)
Has lain so very long on hand,
That I despair of all demand.
I've advertised, but see my books,
Or only watch my shopman's looks ;-
Still Ivan, Ina, and such lumber,
My back-shop glut, my shelves encumber.
There's Byron too, who once did better,
Has sent me, folded in a letter,
A sort of-it's no more a drama
Than Darnley, Ivan, or Kehama :
So alter'd since last year his pen is,
I think he's lost his wits at Venice.
In short, sir, what with one and t'other,
I dare not venture on another.
I write in haste; excuse each blunder;
The coaches through the street so thunder!
My room's so full-we've Gifford here
Reading MS., with Hookham Frere,
Fronouncing on the nouns and particles
Of some of our forthcoming Articles.
The Quarterly-Ah, sir, if you
Had but the genius to review !-
A smart critique upon St Helena,
Or if you only would but tell in a
Short compass what-but to resume:
As I was saying, sir, the room-
The room's so full of wits and bards,
Crabbes, Campbells, Crokers, Freres, and
And others, neither bards nor wits:
My humble tenement admits
All persons in the dress of gent,
From Mr Hammond to Dog Dent.
A party dines with me to-day,
EPISTLE FROM MR MURRAY TO DR All clever men, who make their way:
DEAR Doctor, I have read your play,
Which is a good one in its way,-
Purges the and moves the bowels,
And drenches handkerchiefs like towels
With tears, that, in a flux of grief,
Afford hysterical relief
To shatter'd nerves and quicken'd pulses,
Which your catastrophe convulses.
I like your moral and machinery;
Your plot, too, has such scope for scenery ;
Your dialogue is apt and smart :
The play's concoction full of art;
Your hero raves, your heroine cries,
All stab, and everybody dies.
In short, your tragedy would be
The very thing to hear and see:
And for a piece of publication,
If I decline on this occasion,
It is not that I am not sensible
To merits in themselves ostensible,
But-and I grieve to speak it-plays
Are drugs-mere drugs, sir,-now-a-days.
I had a heavy loss by Manuel,'-
Too lucky if it prove not annual,-
Crabbe, Malcolm, Hamilton, and Chantrey,
Are all partakers of my pantry.
They're at this moment in discussion
On poor De Staël's late dissolution.
Her book, they say, was in advance-
Pray Heaven, she tell the truth of France!
Thus run our time and tongues away ;-
But, to return, sir, to your play :
Sorry, sir, but I cannot deal,
Unless 'twere acted by O'Neill;
My hands so full, my head so busy,
I'm almost dead, and always dizzy;
And so, with endless truth and hurry,
Dear Doctor, I am yours,
JOHN MURRAY. August, 1817.
EPISTLE TO MR MURRAY.
My dear Mr Murray,
You're in a damn'd hurry,
To set up this ultimate Canto;
But (if they don't rob us)
You'll see Mr Hobhouse
Will bring it safe in his portmanteau.
No great things, to be sure,
You could hardly begin with a less work; For the pompous rascallion,
Who don't speak Italian
JOHN WILLIAM RIZZO HOPPNER.
HIS father's sense, his mother's grace,
In him, I hope, will always fit so;
With still to keep him in good case-
The health and appetite of Rizzo.
February, 1818.
[work. THE Ode to Venice' was written during the
Nor French, must have scribbled by guess-period of Byron's residence in the city of a
TO MR MURRAY.
STRAHAN, Tonson, Lintot of the times,
Patron and publisher of rhymes,
For thee the bard up Pindus climbs,
My Murray.
To thee, with hope and terror dumb,
The unfledged MS. authors come;
Thou printest all-and sellest some-
My Murray.
Upon thy table's baize so green
The last new Quarterly is seen,—
But where is thy new Magazine,
My Murray?
Along thy sprucest bookshelves shine
The works thou deemest most divine-
The Art of Cookery,' and mine,
My Murray.
Tours, Travels, Essays, too, I wist,
And Sermons, to thy mill bring grist;
And then thou hast the Navy List,'
My Murray.
And Heaven forbid I should conclude Without the Board of Longitude,' Although this narrow paper would, My Murray.
hundred isles,' in 1818. Shelley, who visited him at that period, used to say that all he observed of the workings of Byron's mind during his visit, gave him a far higher idea of its powers than he had ever before entertained.
The city, the history of which is so full of romantic and poetic incidents, suggested also the poet's two dramas, Marino Faliero' and the Two Foscari.'
The lament for the lost glory of the Ocean Queen has happily not proved prophetic.
'There is no Hope for Nations, cannot be said of the ransomed Venetia, who shares the hopes, the energies, and the future of young Italy. There was something prosaic, and like this workaday nineteenth century, in the means employed for her deliverance; but the origin of her freedom may be traced back to the fields of Magenta and Solferino, red with the best blood of her brethren.-EDIT.
OH Venice! Venice! when thy marble walls
Are level with the waters, there shall be
A cry of nations o'er thy sunken halls,
A loud lament along the sweeping sea! If I, a northern wanderer, weep for thee, What should thy sons do?-anything but weep: And yet they only murmur in their sleep. In contrast with their fathers-as the slime, The dull green ooze of the receding deep, Is with the dashing of the spring-tide foam That drives the sailor shipless to his home, Are they to those that were; and thus they creep, Crouching and crab-like, through their sapping
Oh! agony-that centuries should reap
No mellower harvest! Thirteen hundred years
Of wealth and glory turn'd to dust and tears,
And every monument the stranger meets,
Church, palace, pillar, as a mourner greets;
And even the Lion all subdued appears,
And the harsh sound of the barbarian drum,
With dull and daily dissonance, repeats
The echo of thy tyrant's voice along
The soft waves, once all musical to song,
That heaved beneath the moonlight with the
Of gondolas-and to the busy hum
Of cheerful creatures, whose most sinful deeds
Were but the overbeating of the heart,
And flow of too much happiness, which needs
Venice, March 25, 1818. The aid of age to turn its course apart
From the luxuriant and voluptuous flood
Of sweet sensations, battling with the blood
But these are better than the gloomy errors,
The weeds of nations in their last decay,
When vice walks forth with her unsoften'd
terrors,
And Mirth is madness, and but smiles to slay;
And Hope is nothing but a false delay,
Heavy and sore, in which long yoked they
The sand,-or if there sprung the yellow grain,
'Twas not for them, their necks were too much
bow'd,
And their dead palates chew'd the cud of pain:
Yes! the few spirits,—who, despite of deeds
Which they abhor, confound not with the cause
Those momentary starts from Nature's laws,
Which, like the pestilence and earthquake, smite
But for a term, then pass, and leave the earth
With a few summers, and again put forth
Cities and generations-fair, when free-
For, Tyranny, there blooms no bud for thee!
The sick man's lightning half an hour ere death,
When Faintness, the last mortal birth of Pain,
And apathy of limb, the dull beginning [ning,
Of the cold staggering race which Death is win-With all her seasons to repair the blight
Steals vein by vein and pulse by pulse away;
Yet so relieving the o'er-tortured clay,
To him appears renewal of his breath,
And freedom the mere numbness of his chain;
And then he talks of life, and how again
He feels his spirit soaring-albeit weak,
And of the fresher air, which he would seek:
And as he whispers knows not that he gasps,
That his thin finger feels not what it clasps,
And so the film comes o'er him, and the dizzy
Chamber swims round and round, and shadows
busy,
At which he vainly catches, flit and gleam,
Till the last rattle chokes the strangled scream,
And all is ice and blackness,-and the earth
That which it was the moment ere our birth.
There is no hope for nations!-Search the page
Of many thousand years-the daily scene,
The flow and ebb of each recurring age,
The everlasting to be which hath been,
Hath taught us nought, or little : still we lean
On things that rot beneath our weight, and wear
Our strength away in wrestling with the air:
For 'tis our nature strikes us down the beasts
Slaughter'd in hourly hecatombs for feasts
Are of as high an order-they must go
Ev'n where their driver goads them, though to
slaughter.
Ye men, who pour your blood for kings as water,
What have they given your children in return?
A heritage of servitude and woes,
A blindfold bondage, where your hire is blows.
What! do not yet the red-hot plough-shares
O'er which you stumble in a false ordeal, [burn,
And deem this proof of loyalty the real;
Kissing the hand that guides you to your scars,
And glorying as you tread the glowing bars?
All that your sires have left you, all that Time
Bequeaths of free, and History of sublime,
Spring from a different theme! Ye see and read,
Admire and sigh, and then succumb and bleed!
Save the few spirits who, despite of all, [der'd
And worse than all, the sudden crimes engen-
By the down-thundering of the prison-wall,
And thirst to swallow the sweet waters tender'd,
Gushing from Freedom's fountains, when the
crowd,
Madden'd with centuries of drought, are loud,
And trample on each other to obtain
The cup which brings oblivion of a chain
Glory and Empire! once upon these towers
With Freedom-godlike Triad! how ye sate!
The league of mightiest nations, in those hours
When Venice was an envy, might abate,
But did not quench her spirit; in her fate
All were enwrapp'd: the feasted monarchs knew
And loved their hostess, nor could learn to
hate,
The many felt, for from all days and climes
Although they humbled-with the kingly few
She was the voyager's worship; even her crimes
Were of the softer order-born of Love,
She drank no blood, nor fatten'd on the dead,
But gladden'd where her harmless conquests
spread;
For these restored the Cross, that from above
Hallow'd her sheltering banners, which incessant
Flew between earth and the unholy Crescent,
Which, if it waned and dwindled, Earth may
The city it has clothed in chains, which clank
Now, creaking in the ears of those who owe
The name of Freedom to her glorious struggles;
Yet she but shares with them a common woe,
And call'd the 'kingdom' of a conquering foe,
With what set gilded terms a tyrant juggles!
But knows what all-and, most of all, we know-
The name of Commonwealth is past and gone
O'er the three fractions of the groaning globe;
Venice is crush'd, and Holland deigns to own
A sceptre, and endures the purple robe;
If the free Switzer yet bestrides alone
His chainless mountains, 'tis but for a time,
For tyranny of late is cunning grown,
And in its own good season tramples down
The sparkles of our ashes. One great clime,
Whose vigorous offspring by dividing ocean
Are kept apart and nursed in the devotion
Of Freedom, which their fathers fought for, and
Bequeath'd-a heritage of heart and hand,
And proud distinction from each other land,
Whose sons must bow them at a monarch's
motion,
As if his senseless sceptre were a wand
Full of the magic of exploded science-
Still one great clime, in full and free defiance,
Yet rears her crest, unconquer'd and sublime, Above the far Atlantic !-she has taught Her Esau-brethren that the haughty flag, The floating fence of Albion's feebler crag, May strike to those whose red right hands have bought [for ever,
Rights cheaply earn'd with blood. Still, still
Better, though each man's life-blood were a river,
That it should flow, and overflow, than creep
Through thousand lazy channels in our veins,
Damm'd like the dull canal with locks and chains,
And moving, as a sick man in his sleep,
Three paces, and then faltering :-better be
Where the extinguish'd Spartans still are free,
In their proud charnel of Thermopylæ,
Than stagnate in our marsh,-or o'er the deep
Fly, and one current to the ocean add,
One spirit to the souls our fathers had,
One freeman more, America, to thee!
TRANSLATION FROM VITTORELLI. ON A NUN.
Sonnet composed in the name of a father, whose daughter had recently died shortly after her marriage; and addressed to the father of her who had lately taken the veil.
Of two fair virgins, modest, though admired, Heaven made us happy; and now, wretched sires,
Heaven for a nobler doom their worth desires,
And gazing upon either, both required.
Mine, while the torch of Hymen newly fired
Becomes extinguish'd, soon-too soon-ex-
pires:
But thine, within the closing grate retired,
Eternal captive, to her God aspires.
But thou at least from out the jealous door,
Which shuts between your never-meeting eyes,
May'st hear her sweet and pious voice once
I to the marble, where my daughter lies, Rush,-the swoln flood of bitterness I pour, And knock, and knock, and knock-but none replies.
STANZAS TO THE PO. RIVER, that rollest by the ancient walls,
Where dwells the lady of my love, when she Walks by thy brink, and there perchance recalls A faint and fleeting memory of me ; What if thy deep and ample stream should be A mirror of my heart, where she may read The thousand thoughts I now betray to thee, Wild as thy wave, and headlong as thy speed! What do I say a mirror of my heart? [strong? Are not thy waters sweeping, dark, and Such as my feelings were and are, thou art;
And such as thou art were my passions long. Time may have somewhat tamed them,-not
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The twilight air, unharm'd by summer's heat. She will look on thee,-I have look'd on thee, Full of that thought: and, from that moment, ne'er
Thy waters could I dream of, name, or see,
Without the inseparable sigh for her!
Her bright eyes will be imaged in thy stream,
Yes! they will meet the wave I gaze on now:
Mine cannot witness, even in a dream,
That happy wave repass me in its flow!
The wave that bears my tears returns no more:
Will she return by whom that wave shall
sweep?
[shore,
Both tread thy banks, both wander on thy
I by thy source, she by the dark-blue deep.
But that which keepeth us apart is not
Distance, nor depth of wave, nor space of
But the distraction of a various lot, [earth,
As various as the climates of our birth.
A stranger loves the lady of the land,
Born far beyond the mountains, but his blood
Is all meridian, as if never fann'd
By the black wind that chills the polar flood. My blood is all meridian; were it not,
I had not left my clime, nor should I be, In spite of tortures ne'er to be forgot,
A slave again of love,—at least of thee. 'Tis vain to struggle-let me perish youngLive as I lived, and love as I have loved; To dust if I return, from dust I sprung, And then, at least, my heart can ne'er be moved.
SONNET TO GEORGE THE FOURTH,
ON THE REPEAL OF
LORD EDWARD FITZGERALD'S FORFEITURE.
To be the father of the fatherless,
[and raise
To stretch the hand from the throne's height,
His offspring, who expired in other days
To make thy sire's sway by a kingdom less,-
This is to be a monarch, and repress
Envy into unutterable praise.
Dismiss thy guard, and trust thee to such traits, For who would lift a hand, except to bless ? Were it not easy, sir, and is't not sweet, To make thyself beloved? and to be Omnipotent by mercy's means? for thus Thy sovereignty would grow but more complete :
Thou overflow'st thy banks, and not for aye Thy bosom overboils, congenial river! [away: A Thy floods subside, and mine have sunk
despot thou, and yet thy people free, And by the heart, not hand, enslaving us.
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