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The soul and source of music, which makes | Which blighted their life's bloom, and then deknown

Eternal harmony, and sheds a charm

Like to the fabled Cytherea's zone,7

Binding all things with beauty:-'t would dis

arm

parted:

Itself expired, but leaving them an age

Of years all winters,-war within themselves to wage:

95

The spectre Death, had he substantial power Now, where the quick Rhone thus hath cleft his

to harm.

91

Not vainly did the early Persian make
His altar the high places, and the peak
Of earth-o'ergazing mountains, and thus take
A fit and unwalled temple, there to seek
The Spirit, in whose honour shrines are weak.
Upreared of human hands. Come, and compare
Columns and idol-dwellings, Goth or Greek,
With Nature's realms of worship, earth and air,
Nor fix on fond abodes to circumscribe thy
prayer!

92

The sky is changed!—and such a change! Oh night,

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And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous Sky, mountains, river, winds, lake, lightnings!

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Though in their souls, which thus each other Laughing the clouds away with playful scorn,

thwarted,

Love was the very root of the fond rage

7 The cestus of Venus, which inspired Love.

And living as if earth contained no tomb,-
And glowing into day: we may resume
The march of our existence: and thus I,

Still on thy shores, fair Leman! may find room | Ours is a trophy which will not decay And food for meditation, nor pass by

Much, that may give us pause, if ponder'd fittingly.

VENICE. FROM CANTO IV

1

I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;1
A palace and a prison on each hand:

I saw from out the wave her structures rise
As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand:
A thousand years their cloudy wings expand
Around me, and a dying Glory smiles
O'er the far times, when many a subject land
Looked to the winged Lion's3 marble piles,
Where Venice sate in state, throned on her
hundred isles!

2

She looks a sea Cybele, fresh from ocean,
Rising with her tiara of proud towers
At airy distance, with majestic motion,
A ruler of the waters and their powers;
And such she was;-her daughters had their

dowers

From spoils of nations, and the exhaustless

East

Poured in her lap all gems in sparkling showers. In purple was she robed, and of her feast Monarchs partook, and deemed their dignity

increased.

3

In Venice Tasso's echoes are no more,5
And silent rows the songless gondolier;
Her palaces are crumbling to the shore,
And music meets not always now the ear:
Those days are gone-but Beauty still is here.
States fall, arts fade-but Nature doth not die,
Nor yet forget how Venice once was dear,
The pleasant place of all festivity,

The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy! 4

But unto us she hath a spell beyond
Her name in story, and her long array

Of mighty shadows, whose dim forms despond
Above the dogeless city's vanished sway;

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With the Rialto; Shylock and the Moor,"
And Pierre,s cannot be swept or worn away-
The keystones of the arch! though all were
o'er,

For us repeopled were the solitary shore.

5

The beings of the mind are not of clay;
Essentially immortal, they create
And multiply in us a brighter ray

And more beloved existence: that which Fate
Prohibits to dull life, in this our state
Of mortal bondage, by these spirits supplied,
First exiles, then replaces what we hate;
Watering the heart whose early flowers have
died,

And with a fresher growth replenishing the void.

13

Before St. Mark still glow his Steeds of brass,
Their gilded collars glittering in the sun;
But is not Doria's menace come to pass??
Are they not bridled?-Venice, lost and won,
Her thirteen hundred years of freedom done,
Sinks, like a sea-weed, into whence she rose!
Better be whelmed beneath the waves, and shun,
Even in destruction's depth, her foreign foes,
From whom submission wrings an infamous

repose.

14

In youth she was all glory, a new Tyre,
Her very by-word sprung from victory,
The "Planter of the Lion," which through fire
And blood she bore o'er subject earth and sea;
Though making many slaves, herself still free,
And Europe's bulwark 'gainst the Ottomite;-
Witness Troy's rival, Candia! 10 Vouch it, ye
Immortal waves that saw Lepanto's fight!11

For ye are names no time nor tyranny can blight.

15

Statues of glass—all shivered-the long file
Of her dead Doges are declined to dust;
But where they dwelt, the vast and sumptuous

pile

Bespeaks the pageant of their splendid trust;

6 Here evidently meaning the Bridge of the Rialto across the Grand Canal.

7 Othello

8 A character in Otway's Venice Preserved.

9 This Genoese admiral once threatened to put a bridle on the bronze steeds that adorn St. Mark's.

10 Crete. once possessed by Venice, but lost again to the Turks.

11 The battle of Lepanto, 1571, a victory over the Turks in which Venice took a leading part.

O'er steps of broken thrones and temples, Ye!
Whose agonies are evils of a day-

Their sceptre broken, and their sword in rust, | The cypress, hear the owl, and plod your way
Have yielded to the stranger: empty halls,
Thin streets, and foreign aspects, such as must
Too oft remind her who and what enthralls,
Have flung a desolate cloud o'er Venice'
lovely walls.

16

When Athens' armies fell at Syracuse,
And fettered thousands bore the yoke of war,
Redemption rose up in the Attic Muse,12
Her voice their only ransom from afar;
See! as they chant the tragic hymn, the car
Of the o'ermastered victor stops, the reins
Fall from his hands, his idle scimitar
Starts from its belt-he rends his captive's
chains,

A world is at our feet as fragile as our clay.

79

The Niobe of nations!" there she stands,
Childless and crownless, in her voiceless woe;
An empty urn within her withered hands,
Whose holy dust was scattered long ago;
The Scipios' tomb contains no ashes now;
The very sepulchres lie tenant less

Of their heroic dwellers: dost thou flow,
Old Tiber! through a marble wilderness?
Rise, with thy yellow waves, and mantle her
distress.

80

And bids him thank the bard for freedom The Goth, the Christian, Time, War, Flood, and

and his strains.

17

Thus, Venice, if no stronger claim were thine,
Were all thy proud historic deeds forgot,
Thy choral memory of the Bard divine,
Thy love of Tasso, should have cut the knot
Which ties thee to thy tyrants; and thy lot
Is shameful to the nations,-most of all,
Albion to thee: the Ocean queen should not
Abandon Ocean's children; in the fall

Of Venice, think of thine, despite thy watery
wall.

18

I loved her from my boyhood; she to me
Was as a fairy city of the heart,
Rising like water-columns from the sea,
Of joy the sojourn, and of wealth the mart;
And Otway, Radcliffe,13 Schiller, 14 Shake-
speare's art,

Had stamped her image in me, and even so,
Although I found her thus, we did not part,
Perchance even dearer in her day of woe,
Than when she was a boast, a marvel and a
show.

ROME. FROM CANTO IV

78

Oh Rome! my country! city of the soul
The orphans of the heart must turn to thee,
Lone mother of dead empires! and control
In their shut breasts their petty misery.
What are our woes and sufferance? Come and

see

12 It is said that the Athenian prisoners who could recite Euripides were set free. Cp. page 233, note 5.

13 In The Mysteries of Udolpho.

14 In The Ghost-Seer.

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142

Yet, Freedom! yet thy banner, torn but flying, But here, where Murder breathed her bloody Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind;

Thy trumpet voice, though broken now and dying,

The loudest still the tempest leaves behind;

Thy tree hath lost its blossoms, and the rind, Chopped by the axe, looks rough and little

worth,

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steam:

And here, where buzzing nations choked the ways,

And roared or murmured like a mountain stream

Dashing or winding as its torrent strays:
Here, where the Roman million's blame or

praise

Was death or life, the playthings of a crowd, My voice sounds much-and fall the stars'

faint rays

On the arena void-seats crushed, walls bowedAnd galleries, where my steps seem echoes strangely loud.

143

A ruin-yet what ruin! from its mass
Walls, palaces, half-cities, have been reared;
Yet oft the enormous skeleton ye pass,
And marvel where the spoil could have ap-
peared.

Hath it indeed been plundered, or but cleared?
Alas! developed, opens the decay,

When the colossal fabric's form is neared:
It will not bear the brightness of the day,
Which streams too much on all years, man,
have reft away.

17 Suggested by the statue of The Dying Gaul, once supposed to represent a dying gladiator.

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Thus spake the pilgrims o'er this mighty wall In Saxon times, which we are wont to call

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Ancient; and these three mortal things are still Thy shores are empires, changed in all save

On their foundations, and unaltered all;
Rome and her Ruin past Redemption's skill,
The World, the same wide den-of thieves,
or what ye will.

THE OCEAN. FROM CANTO IV
178

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel

thee

Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they? Thy waters washed them power while they

were free,

And many a tyrant since; their shores obey The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay Has dried up realms to deserts: not so thou;— Unchangeable, save to thy wild waves' play, Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow: Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest

now.

183

Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's
form

Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,—
Calm or convulsed, in breeze, or gale, or storm,

What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all con- Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime

ceal.

179

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean-roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin-his control
Stops with the shore; upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,
When, for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and

unknown.

180

His steps are not upon thy paths-thy fields
Are not a spoil for him,-thou dost arise
And shake him from thee; the vile strength
he wields

18 Cæsar was glad to cover his baldness with the wreath of laurel which the senate decreed he should wear.

Dark-heaving-boundless, endless, and sublime,
The image of eternity, the throne

Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime
The monsters of the deep are made; each zone
Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread, fathom-
less, alone.

184

And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy
Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be
Borne, like thy bubbles, onward; from a boy
I wantoned with thy breakers-they to me
Were a delight; and if the freshening sea
Made them a terror-'twas a pleasing fear,
For I was as it were a child of thee,
And trusted to thy billows far and near,

And laid my hand upon thy mane-as I do here.

* This grammatical error, occurring in so lofty a passage, is perhaps the most famous in our literature. It is quite characteristic of Byron's negligence or indifference.

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