Catch the volcano-fire and earthquake spasm, Shake in the general fever. Through the city, Like birds before a storm, the Santons shriek, And prophesyings horrible and new

Are heard among the crowd; that sea of men
Sleeps on the wrecks it made, breathless and still.
A Dervise, learned in the Koran, preaches
That it is written how the sins of Islam
Must raise up a destroyer even now.
The Greeks expect a Saviour 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 blazoned broadly on the noon-day sky;
One saw a red cross stamped upon the sun;

It has rained blood; and monstrous births declare
The secret wrath of Nature and her Lord.
The army encamped 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 sickened, and—

Enter a Fourth Messenger.

MAHMUD.

And thou, pale ghost, dim shadow

Of some untimely rumour, speak!

FOURTH MESSENGER.

One comes

Fainting with toil, covered with foam and blood; He stood, he says, upon Clelonit's

Promontory, which o'erlooks the isles that groan
Under the Briton's frown, and all their waters
Then trembling in the splendour of the moon;
When, as the wandering clouds unveiled 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 Scirocco
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 dreamed he saw the Turkish admiral
And two, the loftiest, of our ships of war,
With the bright image of that Queen of Heaven,
Who hid, perhaps, her face for grief, reversed;
And the abhorred cross-

Go

Where Therma and Asopus swallowed

Persia, as the sand does foam.

Deluge upon deluge followed,

Discord, Macedon, and Rome : And, lastly, thou!

SEMICHORUS I.

Temples and towers,

Citadels and marts, and they
Who live and die there, have been ours,
And may be thine, and must decay;

MAHMUD.

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 honour 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.

AHASUERUS.

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 the undying. Earth and ocean,
Space, and the isles of life or light that gem
The sapphire floods of interstellar air,
This firmament pavilioned upon chaos,
With all its cressets of immortal fire,
Whose outwall, bastioned 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;
Nought is but that it feels itself to be.

MAHMUD.

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.

AHASUERUS.

Mistake me not! All is contained 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

As of the assault 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 engin❜ry,
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
The mingled battle-cry-ha! hear I not
'EV TOUTO VÍKη. Allah-illah-Allah!

AHASUERUS.

The sulphureous mist is raised-thou seest

MAHMUD.

A chasm,

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!

AHASUERUS.

What thou see'st

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,
Bow their towered crests to mutability.

Poised by the flood, e'en on the height thou holdest,

Thou mayst now learn how the full tide of power
Ebbs to its depths.-Inheritor of glory,
Conceived in darkness, born in blood, and nourished
With tears and toil, thou seest the mortal throes
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 called 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.

MAHMUD.

[Exit AHASUERUS.

Approach!

PHANTOM.

I come

Thence whither thou must go! The grave is fitter
To take the living, than give up the dead;
Yet has thy faith prevailed, 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 aërie, 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,
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,
Like us, shall 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!
Stript of their mortal strength, as thou of thine.
Islam must fall, but we will reign together
Over its ruins in the world of death :-
And if the trunk be dry, yet shall the seed
Unfold itself even in the shape of that
Which gathers birth in its decay.
Woe! woe!
To the weak people tangled in the grasp
Of its last spasms.

MAHMUD.

Spirit, woe to all!

Woe to the wronged and the avenger! Woe
To the destroyer, woe to the destroyed!
Woe to the dupe, and woe to the deceiver!
Woe to the oppressed, and woe to the oppressor !
Woe both to those that suffer and inflict;

Those who are born, and those who die! But say
Imperial shadow of the thing I am,

When, how, by whom, Destruction must accomplish Her consummation?

PHANTOM.

Ask the cold pale Hour,

Rich in reversion of impending death,
When he shall fall upon whose ripe grey hairs
Sit care, and sorrow, and infirmity-

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?
It matters not!-for nought 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,
Seemed an Elysian isle of peace and joy
Never to be attained.-I must rebuke
This drunkenness of triumph ere it die,
And dying, bring despair.-Victory!—poor slaves!
[Exit MAHMUD,

When desolation flashes o'er a world destroyed. Oh bear me to those isles of jagged cloud Which float like mountains on the earthquakes, 'mid

The momentary oceans of the lightning;
Or to some toppling promontory proud
Of solid tempest, whose black pyramid,
Riven, overhangs the founts intensely brightening
Of those dawn-tinted deluges of fire
Before their waves expire,

When heaven and earth are light, and only light
In the thunder-night!

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!

These chains are light, fitter for slaves and poisoners Than Greeks. Kill! plunder! burn! let none

remain.

SEMICHORUS I.

Alas for Liberty!

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;

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.

SEMICHORUS I.

Let the tyrants rule the desert they have made; Let the free possess the paradise they claim; Be the fortune of our fierce oppressors weighed With our ruin, our resistance, and our name!

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 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,