5. It is that settled, ceaseless gloom The fabled Hebrew wanderer bore; What Exile from himself can flee ?1 To zones though more and more remote, Still, still pursues, where'er I be, The blight of life-the demon Thought. 7. Yet others rapt in pleasure seem, And taste of all that I forsake; Adieu, fair Cadiz ! yea, a long adieu ! ["What Exile from himself can flee? To other zones, howe'er remote, The blight of life-the demon Thought."- MS.] 2 ["Written January 25, 1810."- MS.] 3 In place of this song, which was written at Athens, January 25. 1810, and which contains, as Moore says, "some of the dreariest touches of sadness that ever Byron's pen let fall," we find, in the first draught of the Canto, the following: 1. Oh never talk again to me Of northern climes and British ladies It has not been your lot to see, Like me, the lovely girl of Cadiz. Although her eye be not of blue, Nor fair her locks, like English lasses, How far its own expressive hue The languid azure eye surpasses! 2. Prometheus-like, from heaven she stole The fire, that through those silken lashes In darkest glances seems to roll, From eyes that cannot hide their flashes: And as along her bosom steal In lengthen'd flow her raven tresses, Our English maids are long to woo, Their lips are slow at Love's confession : But, born beneath a brighter sun, For love ordain'd the Spanish maid is, And who, when fondly, fairly won,Enchants you like the Girl of Cadiz ? 4. The Spanish maid is no coquette, And if she love, or if she hate, Alike she knows not to dissemble. Her heart can ne'er be bought or soldHowe'er it beats, it beats sincerely; And, though it will not bend to gold, Twill love you long and love you dearly. 5. The Spanish girl that meets your love She dares the deed and shares the danger; When all were changing thou alone wert true, A traitor only fell beneath the feud : 4 None hugg'd a conqueror's chain, save fallen Chivalry! LXXXVI. Such be the sons of Spain, and strange her fate! A Kingless people for a nerveless state; War, war is still the cry, "War even to the knife!" 5 LXXXVII. Ye, who would more of Spain and Spaniards know, She hurls the spear, her love's avenger. And when, beneath the evening star, Of Christian knight or Moorish hero, To chaunt the sweet and hallow'd vesper; -- In each her charms the heart must move May match the dark-eyed Girl of Cadiz. 4 Alluding to the conduct and death of Solano, the of Cadiz, in May, 1809. - governor 5 "War to the knife." Palafox's answer to the French general at the siege of Saragoza. [In his proclamation, also, he stated, that, should the French commit any robberies, devastations, and murders, no quarter should be given them. The dogs by whom he was beset, he said, scarcely left him time to clean his sword from their blood, but they still found their grave at Saragoza. All his addresses were in the same spirit. "His language," says Mr. Southey, "had the high tone, and something of the inflation of Spanish romance, suiting the character of those to whom it was directed." See History of the Peninsular War, vol. iii. p. 152.] 6 The Canto, in the original MS., closes with the following stanzas: Ye, who would more of Spain and Spaniards know, Go! hie ye hence to Paternoster Row Are they not written in the Book of Carr, Green Erin's Knight and Europe's wandering star! Then listen, Readers, to the Man of Ink, Hear what he did, and sought, and wrote afar; All these are coop'd within one Quarto's brink, This borrow, steal,- don't buy, and tell us what you think. Porphyry said, that the prophecies of Daniel were written after their completion, and such may be my fate here; but it requires no second sight to toretell a tome: the first glimpse of the knight was enough. [In a letter written from Gibraltar, August 6, 1809, to his friend Hodson, Lord Byron says-"I have seen Sir John Carr at Seville and Cadiz; and, like Swift's barber, have been down on my knees to beg he would not put me into black and white."] There may you read, with spectacles on eyes, How many troops y-cross'd the laughing main There may you read (Oh, Phoebus, save Sir John! All that was said, or sung, or lost, or won, By raunting Wellesley or by blundering Frere, Thus poesy the way to grandeur paves Who would not such diplomatists prefer? But cease, my Muse, thy speed some respite craves, Yet here of Vulpes mention may be made, His soul Socratic no Xantippe awes; Blest with a dame in Virtue's bosom nurst, — On such unshaken fame let Satire do its worst. The Honourable John Wingfield, of the Guards, who died of a fever at Coimbra (May 14. 1811). I had known him ten years, the better half of his life, and the happiest part of mine. In the short space of one month, I have lost her who cave me being, and most of those who had made that being tolerable. To me the lines of Young are no fiction: * Insatiate archer ! could not one suffice? Thy shaft flew thrice, and thrice my peace was slain, I should have ventured a verse to the memory of the late Charles Skinner Matthews, Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge, were he not too much above all praise of mine. His powers of mind, shown in the attainment of greater honours, against the ablest candidates, than those of any graduate on record at Cambridge, have sufficiently established [The "Needy Knife-grinder," in the Anti-jacobin, was a joint production of Messrs. Frere and Canning.] XCI. And thou, my friend! — since unavailing woe Bursts from my heart, and mingles with the strainHad the sword laid thee with the mighty low, Pride might forbid e'en Friendship to complain : But thus unlaurel'd to descend in vain, By all forgotten, save the lonely breast, And mix unbleeding with the boasted slain, While Glory crowns so many a meaner crest! What hadst thou done to sink so peacefully to rest? XCII. Oh, known the earliest, and esteem'd the most! 2 Dear to a heart where nought was left so dear! Though to my hopeless days for ever lost, In dreams deny me not to see thee here! And Morn in secret shall renew the tear Of Consciousness awaking to her woes, And Fancy hover o'er thy bloodless bier, Till my frail frame return to whence it rose, And mourn'd and mourner lie united in repose. XCIII. Here is one fytte of Harold's pilgrimage : Ye who of him may further seek to know, Shall find some tidings in a future page, If he that rhymeth now may scribble moe. Is this too much? stern Critic! say not so: Patience! and ye shall hear what he beheld In other lands, where he was doom'd to go: Lands that contain the monuments of Eld, Ere Greece and Grecian arts by barbarous hands were quell'd. 3 his fame on the spot where it was acquired; while his softer qualities live in the recollection of friends who loved him too well to envy his superiority. -[This and the following stanza were added in August, 1811. In one of his school-boy poems, entitled "Childish Recollections," Lord Byron has thus drawn the portrait of young Wingfield :— "Alonzo! best and dearest of my friends, Thy name ennobles him who thus commends: If hope anticipates the words of truth, All, all that brothers should be, but the name." Matthews, the idol of Lord Byron at college, was drowned, while bathing in the Cam, on the 2d of August The following passage of a letter from Newstead to his friend Scrope Davies, written immediately after the event, bears the impress of strong and even agonised feelings:-"My dearest Davies; some curse hangs over me and mine. My mother lies a corpse in the house; one of my best friends is drowned in a ditch. What can I say, or think, or do? I received a letter from him the day before yesterday. My dear Scrope, if you can spare a moment, do come down to me I want a friend. Matthews's last letter was written on Friday, on Saturday he was not. In ability, who was like Matthews? How did we all shrink before him. You do me but justice in saying I would have risked my paltry existence to have preserved his. This very evening did I mean to write, inviting him, as I invite you, my very dear friend, to visit me. What will our poor Hobhouse feel? His letters breathe but of Matthews. Come to me, Scrope, I am almost desolate - left almost alone in the world!"-Matthews was the son of John Matthews, Esq. (the representative of Herefordshire, in the parliament of 1802—6), and brother of the author of "The Diary of an Invalid," also untimely snatched away.] 2 ["Beloved the most."- MS.] 3 [" Dec. 30th, 1809.” — MS.] 1 Part of the Acropolis was destroyed by the explosion of a magazine during the Venetian siege. [On the highest part of Lycabettus, as Chandler was informed by an eye-witness, the Venetians, in 1687, placed four mortars and six pieces of cannon, when they battered the Acropolis. One of the bombs was fatal to some of the sculpture on the west front of the Parthenon. "In 1667," says Mr. Hobhouse, “every antiquity of which there is now any trace in the Acropolis, was in a tolerable state of preservation. This great temple might, at that period, be called entire;-having been previously a Christian church, it was then a mosque, the most beautiful in the world. At present, only twenty-nine of the Doric columns, some of which no longer support their entablatures, and part of the left wall of the cell, remain standing. Those of the north side, the angular ones excepted, have all fallen. The portion yet standing cannot fail to fill the mind of the indifferent spectator with sentiments of astonishment and awe; and the same reflections arise upon the sight even of the enormous masses of marble ruins which are spread upon the area of the temple. Such scattered fragments will soon constitute the sole remains of the Temple of Minerva."] 2 We can all feel, or imagine, the regret with which the ruins of cities, once the capitals of empires, are beheld: the reflections suggested by such objects are too trite to require recapitulation. But never did the littleness of man, and the vanity of his very best virtues, of patriotism to exalt, and of valour to defend his country, appear more conspicuous than in the record of what Athens was, and the certainty of what she now is. This theatre of contention between mighty factions, of the struggles of orators, the exaltation and deposition of tyrants, the triumph and punishment of generals, is now become a scene of petty intrigue and perpetual disturbance, between the bickering agents of certain British nobility and gentry. "The wild foxes, the owls and serpents in the ruins of Babylon," were surely less degrading than such inhabitants. The Turks have the plea of conquest for their tyranny, and the Greeks have only suffered the fortune of war, incidental to the bravest; but how are the mighty fallen, when two painters contest the privilege of plundering the Parthenon, and triumph in turn, according to the tenor of each succeeding firman! Sylla could but punish, Philip subdue, and Xerxes burn Athens; but it remained for the paltry antiquarian, and his despicable agents, to render her contemptible as himself and his pursuits. The Parthenon, before its destruction in part, by fire during the Venetian siege, had been a temple, a church, and a mosque. In each point of view it is an object of regard: it changed its worshippers; but still it was a place of worship thrice sacred to devotion: its violation is a triple sacrifice. But"Man, proud man, 3 Drest in a little brief authority, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven [In the original MS. we find the following note to this and the five following stanzas, which had been prepared for publication, but was afterwards withdrawn, "from a fear," says the poet, "that it might be considered rather as an attack, than a defence of religion:"-" In this age of bigotry, when the puritan and priest have changed places, and the wretched Catholic is visited with the sins of his fathers,' even unto generations far beyond the pale of the commandment, the cast of opinion in these stanzas will, doubtless, meet with many a contemptuous anathema. But let it be remembered, that the spirit they breathe is desponding, not sneering, scepticism; that he who has seen the Greek and Moslem superstitions contending for mastery over the former shrines of Polytheism -who has left in his own, Pharisees, thanking God that they are not like publicans and sinners, and Spaniards in theirs, abhorring the heretics, who have holpen them in their need, will be not a little bewildered, and begin to think, that as only one of them can be right, they may, most of them, be wrong. With regard to morals, and the effect of religion on mankind, it appears, from all historical testimony, to have had less effect in making them love their neighbours, than in. ducing that cordial Christian abhorrence between sectaries and schismatics. The Turks and Quakers are the most tolerant: if an Infidel pays his heratch to the former, he may pray how, when, and where he pleases; and the mild tenets, and devout demeanour of the latter, make their lives the truest commentary on the Sermon on the Mount."] 4 ["Still wilt thou harp."- MS.] 5 It was not always the custom of the Greeks to burn their dead; the greater Ajax, in particular, was interred entire. Almost all the chiefs became gods after their decease; and he was indeed neglected, who had not annual games near his tomb, or festivals in honour of his memory by his countrymen, as Achilles, Brasidas, &c., and at last even Antinous, whose death was as heroic as his life was infamous. 1 [In the original MS., for this magnificent stanza, we find what follows: Frown not upon me, churlish Priest! that I I am no sneerer at thy phantasy; Thou pitiest me,-alas! I envy thee, Thou bold discoverer in an unknown sea, Of happy isles and happier tenants there; I ask thee not to prove a Sadducee; Still dream of Paradise, thou know'st not where, But lov'st too well to bid thine erring brother share."] [Lord Byron wrote this stanza at Newstead, in October, 11, on hearing of the death of his Cambridge friend, young Eddlestone; making," he says, "the sixth, within four onths, of friends and relations that I have lost between May and the end of August." See post, Hours of Idleness, 1. The Cornelian."] The thought and the expression," says Professor Clarke, in a letter to Lord Byron, "are here so truly Petrarch's, that I would ask you whether you ever read, — 'Poi quando 'I vero sgombra Quel dolce error pur li medesmo assido, Me freddo, pietra morta in pietra viva; In guisa d' uom chè pensi e piange e scriva;' Thus rendered by Wilmot, But when rude truth destroys The loved illusion of the dreamed sweets, I sit me down on the cold rugged stone, Less cold, less dead than I, and think and weep alone.'"] 4 The temple of Jupiter Olymplus, of which sixteen columns, entirely of marble, yet survive: originally there were one hundred and fifty. These columns, however, are by many supposed to have belonged to the Pantheon. 5 See Appendix to this Canto [A], for a note too long to be placed here. The ship was wrecked in the Archipelago. 6 [" Cold and accursed as his native coast."- MS.] 7 I cannot resist availing myself of the permission of my friend Dr. Clarke, whose name requires no comment with the public, but whose sanction will add tenfold weight to my testimony, to insert the following extract from a very obliging letter of his to me, as a note to the above lines: -"When the last of the metopes was taken from the Parthenon, and, in moving of it, great part of the superstructure with one of the triglyphs was thrown down by the workmen whom Lord Elgin employed, the Disdar, who beheld the mischief done to the building, took his pipe from his mouth, dropped a tear, and, in a supplicating tone of voice, said to Lusieri, Tixes! — I was present." The Disdar alluded to was the father of the present Disdar. 8 [After stanza xiii. the original MS. has the following:"Come, then, ye classic Thanes of each degree, Dark Hamilton and sullen Aberdeen, Than ye should bear one stone from wrong'd Athena's site. Or will the gentle Dilettanti crew Now delegate the task to digging Gell, That mighty limner of a birds'-eye view, How like to Nature let his volumes tell; Who can with him the folio's limits swell With all the Author saw, or said he saw? Who can topographize or delve so well? No boaster he, nor impudent and raw, His pencil, pen, and shade, alike without a flaw."] 1 According to Zosimus, Minerva and Achilles frightened Alaric from the Acropolis; but others relate that the Gothic XXI. The moon is up; by Heaven, a lovely eve! Long streams of light o'er dancing waves expand; Now lads on shore may sigh, and maids believe: Such be our fate when we return to land! Meantime some rude Arion's restless hand Wakes the brisk harmony that sailors love; A circle there of merry listeners stand, Or to some well-known measure featly move, Thoughtless, as if on shore they still were free to rove. XXII. 4 Through Calpe's straits survey the steepy shore; From mountain-cliff to coast descending sombre down. XXIII. 'Tis night, when Meditation bids us feel Death hath but little left him to destroy! [boy?" Ah! happy years! once more who would not be a king was nearly as mischievous as the Scottish peer. See Chandler. 2 To prevent blocks or splinters from falling on deck during action. 3 ["From Discipline's stern law," &c. - MS.] ["Plies the brisk instrument that sailors love."- MS.] 5 ["Bleeds the lone heart, once boundless in its zeal, And friendless now, yet dreams it had a friend."MS.] 6 ["Ah! happy years! I would I were once more a boy." MS.] |