but away" "And sleeping pangs awake-and- "In arts and sciences our isle hath shone" My verse or I'm a fool-and Fame's a liar, "Thee we invoke, your sister arts implore" With "smiles," and "lyres," and "pencils," and much "Three who have stolen their witching airs from (You all know what I mean, unless you're stupid): "Harmonious throng" that I have kept in petto, Now to produce in a "divine sestetto"!! "While Poesy," with these delightful doxies, "Sustains her part" in all the "upper" boxes! "Thus lifted gloriously, you'll soar along," Borne in the vast balloon of Busby's song; "Shine in your farce, masque, scenery, and play" (For this last line George had a holiday). "Old Drury never, never soar'd so high," So says the manager, and so say I. [pride;" "But hold, you say, this self-complacent boast;" Is this the poem which the public lost? "True-true-that lowers at once our mounting But lo!-the papers print what you deride. ""Tis ours to look on you- you hold the prize," 'Tis twenty guineas, as they advertise! "A double blessing your rewards impart ". I wish I had them, then, with all my heart. "Our twofold feeling owns its twofold cause," Why son and I both beg for your applause. "When in your fostering beams you bid us live," My next subscription list shall say how much you give! October, 1812. VERSES FOUND IN A SUMMER HOUSE AT WHEN Dryden's fool, "unknowing what he sought," Did modern swains, possess'd of Cymon's powers, REMEMBER THEE! REMEMBER THEE! REMEMBER thee! remember thee! Till Lethe quench life's burning stream Remorse and shame shall cling to thee, And haunt thee like a feverish dream! Remember thee! Ay, doubt it not. Thy husband too shall think of thee: By neither shalt thou be forgot, Thou false to him, thou fiend to me! TO TIME. TIME on whose arbitrary wing Hail thou! who on my birth bestow'd For now I bear the weight alone. I would not one fond heart should share Thy future ills shall press in vain: Yet even that pain was some relief; Retards, but never counts the hour. In joy I've sigh'd to think thy flight Would soon subside from swift to slow; Thy cloud could overcast the light, But could not add a night to woe; For then, however drear and dark, My soul was suited to thy sky; One star alone shot forth a spark To prove thee-not Eternity. That beam hath sunk, and now thou art One scene even thou canst not deform; And I can smile to think how weak Thine efforts shortly shall be shown, When all the vengeance thou canst wreak Must fall upon-a nameless stone. morning at her quondam lover's apartments. His Lordship was from home; but finding Fathek on the table, the lady wrote in the first page of the volume the words Remember me!' Byron immediately wrote under the ominous warning these two stanzas."-MEDWIN.] TRANSLATION OF A ROMAIC LOVE SONG. AH! Love was never yet without Which rends my heart with ceaseless sigh, Without one friend to hear my woe, Birds, yet in freedom, shun the net Which Love around your haunts hath set; Your hearts shall burn, your hopes expire. A bird of free and careless wing Who ne'er have loved, and loved in vain, My light of life! ah, tell me why And art thou changed, and canst thou hate? My curdling blood, my madd'ning brain, And still thy heart, without partaking That joy is harbinger of woe. THOU ART NOT FALSE, BUT THOU ART FICKLE. THOU art not false, but thou art fickle, Are doubly bitter from that thought: 'Tis this which breaks the heart thou grievest, Too well thou lov'st-too soon thou leavest. The wholly false the heart despises, But she who not a thought disguises, To dream of joy and wake to sorrow What must they feel whom no false vision, As if a dream alone had charm'd? Ah! sure such grief is fancy's scheming, And all thy change can be but dreaming! 555 ON BEING ASKED WHAT WAS THE "ORIGIN THE "Origin of Love!"—Ah, why And shouldst thou seek his end to know: REMEMBER HIM, WHOM PASSION'S POWER. When neither fell, though both were loved. That yielding breast, that melting eye, But saved thee all that conscience fears; To spare the vain remorse of years. Yet think of this when many a tongue, Think that, whate'er to others, thou I bless thy purer soul even now, Oh, God! that we had met in time, Our hearts as fond, thy hand more free; Far may thy days, as heretofore, Oh! may such trial be thy last. This heart, alas! perverted long, Itself destroy'd might there destroy; To meet thee in the glittering throng, Would wake Presumption's hope of joy. Then to the things whose bliss or woe, Oh! pardon that imploring tear, Since not by Virtue shed in vain, My frenzy drew from eyes so dear; For me they shall not weep again. Though long and mournful must it be, The thought that we no more may meet; Yet I deserve the stern decree, And almost deem the sentence sweet. Still, had I loved thee less, my heart It felt not half so much to part, As if its guilt had made thee mine. 1813. And, were it lawfully thine own, He'd have but little, and thou -none. "Then thus to form Apollo's crown." A crown! why, twist it how you will, Thy chaplet must be foolscap still. When next you visit Delphi's town, Inquire amongst your fellow-lodgers, They'll tell you Phoebus gave his crown, Some years before your birth, to Rogers. "Let every other bring his own." When coals to Newcastle are carried, And owls sent to Athens, as wonders, From his spouse when the Regent's unmarried, Or Liverpool weeps o'er his blunders; When Tories and Whigs cease to quarrel, When Castlereagh's wife has an heir, Then Rogers shall ask us for laurel, And thou shalt have plenty to spare. TO LORD THURLOW. "I lay my branch of laurel down, Lord Thurlow's lines to Mr. Rogers. 1["Among the many gay hours we passed together in the spring of 1913, I remember particularly the wild flow of his spirits one evening, when we had accompanied Mr. Rogers home from some early assembly. It happened that our host had just received a presentation copy of a volume of poems, written professedly in imitation of the old English writers, and containing, like many of these models, a good deal that was striking and beautiful, mixed up with much that was trifling, fantastic, and absurd. In vain did Mr. Rogers, in justice to the author, endeavour to direct our attention to some of the beauties of the work. In this sort of hunt through the volume, we at length lighted on the discovery that our host, in addition to his sincere approbation of some of its contents, had also the motive of gratitude for standing by its author, as one of the poems was a warm and, I need not add, welldeserved panegyric on himself. The opening line of the poem was, as well as I can recollect, When Rogers o'er this labour bent:' and Lord Byron undertook to read it aloud; but he found it impossible to get beyond the first two words. TO THOMAS MOORE. WRITTEN THE EVENING BEFORE HIS VISIT TO MR. LEIGH HUNT IN HORSEMONGER-LANE GAOL, MAY 19, 1813. Он you, who in all names can tickle the town, Anacreon, Tom Little, Tom Moore, or Tom Brown,— For hang me if I know of which you may most brag, Your Quarto two-pounds, or your Two-penny Post Bag; But now to my letter-to yours 't is an answer— And for Sotheby's Blues have deserted Sam Rogers; [First published, 1830.] Our laughter had now increased to such a pitch that nothing could restrain it. Two or three times he began; but no sooner had the words When Rogers' passed his lips, than our fit burst forth afresh,- till even Mr. Rogers himself, with all his feeling of our injustice, found it impossible not to join A day or two after, Lord Byron sent me the following:My dear Moore, 'When Rogers' must not see the enclosed, which I send for your perusal.'"-MOORE.] us. ? [The reader who wishes to understand the full force of this scandalous insinuation is referred to Muretus's notes on a celebrated poem of Catullus, entitled In Cesarem; but consisting, in fact, of savagely scornful abuse of the favourite Mamurra: "Quis hoc potest videre? quis potest pati, IMPROMPTU, IN REPLY TO A FRIEND. WHEN, from the heart where Sorrow sits, Her dusky shadow mounts too high, And o'er the changing aspect flits, And clouds the brow, or fills the eye; Heed not that gloom, which soon shall sink: My thoughts their dungeon know too well; Back to my breast the wanderers shrink, And droop within their silent cell. 1 September, 1813. SONNET, TO GENEVRA. THINE eyes' blue tenderness, thy long fair hair, And the wan lustre of thy features- caught From contemplation where serenely wrought, Seems Sorrow's softness charm'd from its despair — Have thrown such speaking sadness in thine air, That but I know thy blessed bosom fraught With mines of unalloy'd and stainless thought I should have deem'd thee doom'd to earthly care. With such an aspect, by his colours blent, When from his beauty-breathing pencil born, (Except that thou hast nothing to repent) The Magdalen of Guido saw the morn― SONNET, TO THE SAME. THY cheek is pale with thought, but not from woe, December 17, 1813. [These verses are said to have dropped from the Poet's pen, to excuse a transient expression of melancholy which overclouded the general gaiety. It was impossible to observe his interesting countenance, expressive of a dejection belonging neither to his rank, his age, nor his success, without feeling an indefinable curiosity to ascertain whether it had a deeper cause than habit or constitutional temperament. It was obviously of a degree incalculably more serious than that alluded to by Prince Arthur -"I remember when I was in France Young gentlemen would be as sad as night, Only for wantonness.' But, howsoever derived, this, joined to Lord Byron's air of mingling in amusements and sports as if he contemned them, and felt that his sphere was far above the frivolous crowd which surrounded him, gave a strong effect of colouring to a FROM THE PORTUGUESE. "TU MI CHAMAS." IN moments to delight devoted, "My life!" with tenderest tone, you cry; Dear words! on which my heart had doted, If youth could neither fade nor die. To death even hours like these must roll, ANOTHER VERSION. You call me still your life.-Oh! change the word THE DEVIL'S DRIVE; THE Devil return'd to hell by two, I walk'd in the morning, I'll ride to-night; I should mount in a waggon of wounded men, But these will be furnish'd again and again, And at present my purpose is speed; To see my manor as much as I may, And watch that no souls shall be poach'd away. "I have a state-coach at Carlton House, A chariot in Seymour Place; But they 're lent to two friends, who make me amends, By driving my favourite pace: And they handle their reins with such a grace, I have something for both at the end of their race. "So now for the earth to take my chance:" And making a jump from Moscow to France, And rested his hoof on a turnpike road, character whose tints were otherwise romantic. - SIR WALTER SCOTT.] 2 ["Redde some Italian, and wrote two sonnets. I never wrote but one sonnet before, and that was not in earnest, and many years ago, as an exercise- and I will never write another. They are the most puling, petrifying, stupidly pla tonic compositions."— Byron Diary, 1813.J 3 ["I have lately written a wild, rambling, unfinished rhapsody, called The Devil's Drive,' the notion of which I took from Porson's Devil's Walk.'"— Byron Diary, 1812. “Of this strange, wild poem," says Moore, "the only copy that Lord Byron, I believe, ever wrote, he presented to Lord Holland. Though with a good deal of vigour and imagination, it is, for the most part, rather clumsily executed, wanting the point and condensation of those clever verses of Mr. Coleridge, which Lord Byron, adopting a notion long prevalent, has attributed to Professor Porson."] But first as he flew, I forgot to say, To look upon Leipsic plain; And so sweet to his eye was its sulphury glare, For the field ran so red with the blood of the dead, But the softest note that soothed his ear And the carnage begun, when resistance is done, But the Devil has reach'd our cliffs so white, If his eyes were good, he but saw by night But he made a tour, and kept a journal Of all the wondrous sights nocturnal, And he sold it in shares to the Men of the Row, The Devil first saw, as he thought, the Mail, So instead of a pistol he cock'd his tail, And bade him have no fear, But be true to his club, and stanch to his rein, "Next to seeing a lord at the council board, The Devil gat next to Westminster, [flat; And he turn'd to "the room" of the Commons; The Lord Westmoreland certainly silly, 1["I cannot conceive how the Vault has got about; but so it is. It is too farouche; but truth to say, my sallies are not very playful."- Lord Byron to Mr. Moore, March 12 1814.] Lines composed on the occasion of his Royal Highness the Ah, what can tombs avail !-since these disgorge STANZAS FOR MUSIC. 2 I SPEAK not, I trace not, I breathe not thy name, There is grief in the sound, there is guilt in the fame : But the tear which now burns on my cheek may impart The deep thoughts that dwell in that silence of heart. Too brief for our passion, too long for our peace Were those hours-can their joy or their bitterness [chain,We repent- - we abjure-we will break from our We will part, we will fly to-unite it again! cease? Oh! thine be the gladness, and mine be the guilt! With thee by my side, than with worlds at our feet. One sigh of thy sorrow, one look of thy love, ADDRESS INTENDED TO BE RECITED AT THE CALEDONIAN MEETING. WHO hath not glow'd above the page where fame Hath fix'd high Caledon's unconquer'd name; The mountain-land which spurn'd the Roman chain, And baffled back the fiery-crested Dane, 2 ["Thou hast asked me for a song, and I enclose you an experiment, which has cost me something more than trouble, and is, therefore, less likely to be worth your taking any in your proposed setting. Now, if it be so, throw it into the fire without phrase."—Lord Byron to Mr. Moore, May 10, 1814] |