Then farewell, Horace--whom I hated so,
Not for thy faults, but mine: it is a curse
To understand, not feel thy lyric flow,
To comprehend, but never love thy verse;
Although no deeper Moralist rehearse
Our little life, nor Bard prescribe his art,
Nor livelier Satirist the conscience pierce,
Awakening without wounding the touched heart,
Yet fare thee well--upon Soracte's ridge we part.
LXXVIII.
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
The cypress--hear the owl--and plod your way
O'er steps of broken thrones and temples--Ye!
Whose agonies are evils of a day--
A world is at our feet as fragile as our clay.
LXXIX.
The Niobe of nations! there she stands,
Childless and crownless, in her voiceless woe;[nm]
empty urn within her withered hands,
Whose holy dust was scattered long ago;
The Scipios' tomb contains no ashes now;[457]
The very sepulchres lie tenantless[458]
Of their heroic dwellers: dost thou flow,
Old Tiber! through a marble wilderness?
Rise, with thy yellow waves, and mantle her distress.[459]
LXXX.
The Goth, the Christian--Time--War--Flood, and Fire,[460]
Have dealt upon the seven-hilled City's pride;
She saw her glories star by star expire,[nn]
And up the steep barbarian Monarchs ride,
Where the car climbed the Capitol;[461] far and wide
Temple and tower went down, nor left a site:
Chaos of ruins! who shall trace the void,
O'er the dim fragments cast a lunar light,
And say, "here was, or is," where all is doubly night?
LXXXI.
The double night of ages, and of her,[no]
Night's daughter, Ignorance,[462] hath wrapt and wrap
All round us; we but feel our way to err:
The Ocean hath his chart, the Stars their map,
And Knowledge spreads them on her ample lap;
But Rome is as the desert--where we steer
Stumbling o'er recollections; now we clap
Our hands, and cry "Eureka!" "it is clear"--
When but some false Mirage of ruin rises near.
LXXXII.
Alas! the lofty city! and alas!
The trebly hundred triumphs![463] and the day
When Brutus made the dagger's edge surpass
The Conqueror's sword in bearing fame away!
Alas, for Tully's voice, and Virgil's lay,[np]
And Livy's pictured page!--but these shall be
Her resurrection; all beside--decay.
Alas, for Earth, for never shall we see
That brightness in her eye she bore when Rome was free!
LXXXIII.
Oh, thou, whose chariot rolled on Fortune's wheel,
Triumphant Sylla![464] Thou, who didst subdue
Thy country's foes ere thou wouldst pause to feel
The wrath of thy own wrongs, or reap the due
Of hoarded vengeance till thine Eagles flew
O'er prostrate Asia;--thou, who with thy frown
Annihilated senates;--Roman, too,
With all thy vices--for thou didst lay down
With an atoning smile a more than earthly crown,
LXXXIV.
Thy dictatorial wreath--couldst thou divine
To what would one day dwindle that which made
Thee more than mortal? and that so supine
By aught than Romans Rome should thus be laid?[nq]
She who was named Eternal, and arrayed
Her warriors but to conquer--she who veiled
Earth with her haughty shadow, and displayed,[nr]
Until the o'er-canopied horizon failed,
Her rushing wings--Oh! she who was Almighty hailed!
LXXXV.
Sylla was first of victors; but our own,[ns]
The sagest of usurpers, Cromwell!--he
Too swept off senates while he hewed the throne
Down to a block--immortal rebel! See
What crimes it costs to be a moment free,
And famous through all ages! but beneath
His fate the moral lurks of destiny;
His day of double victory and death
Beheld him win two realms, and, happier, yield his breath.[465]
LXXXVI.
The third of the same Moon whose former course
Had all but crowned him, on the selfsame day
Deposed him gently from his throne of force,
And laid him with the Earth's preceding clay.
And showed not Fortune thus how fame and sway,
And all we deem delightful, and consume
Our souls to compass through each arduous way,
Are in her eyes less happy than the tomb?
Were they but so in Man's, how different were his doom!
LXXXVII.
And thou, dread Statue![466] yet existent in[24.H.]
The austerest form of naked majesty--
Thou who beheldest, 'mid the assassins' din,
At thy bathed base the bloody Caesar lie,
Folding his robe in dying dignity--
An offering to thine altar from the Queen
Of gods and men, great Nemesis! did he die,
And thou, too, perish, Pompey? have ye been
Victors of countless kings, or puppets of a scene?
LXXXVIII.
And thou, the thunder-stricken nurse of Rome![467][25.H.]
She-wolf! whose brazen-imaged dugs impart
The milk of conquest yet within the dome
Where, as a monument of antique art,
Thou standest:--Mother of the mighty heart,
Which the great Founder sucked from thy wild teat,
Scorched by the Roman Jove's ethereal dart,
And thy limbs black with lightning--dost thou yet
Guard thine immortal cubs, nor thy fond charge forget?
LXXXIX.
Thou dost;--but all thy foster-babes are dead--
The men of iron; and the World hath reared
Cities from out their sepulchres: men bled
In imitation of the things[468] they feared,
And fought and conquered, and the same course steered,
At apish distance; but as yet none have,
Nor could, the same supremacy have neared,
Save one vain Man, who is not in the grave--
But, vanquished by himself, to his own slaves a slave--[469]
XC.
The fool of false dominion--and a kind
Of bastard Caesar, following him of old
With steps unequal; for the Roman's mind
Was modelled in a less terrestrial mould,[26.H.]
With passions fiercer, yet a judgment cold,[470]
And an immortal instinct which redeemed
The frailties of a heart so soft, yet bold--
Alcides with the distaff now he seemed
At Cleopatra's feet,--and now himself he beamed,
XCI.
And came--and saw--and conquered![471] But the man
Who would have tamed his Eagles down to flee,
Like a trained falcon, in the Gallic van,[472]
Which he, in sooth, long led to Victory,
With a deaf heart which never seemed to be
A listener to itself, was strangely framed;
With but one weakest weakness--Vanity--[nt]
Coquettish in ambition--still he aimed--
And what? can he avouch, or answer what he claimed?[nu]
XCII.
And would be all or nothing--nor could wait
For the sure grave to level him; few years
Had fixed him with the Caesars in his fate
On whom we tread: For _this_ the conqueror rears
The Arch of Triumph! and for this the tears
And blood of earth flow on as they have flowed,
An universal Deluge, which appears
Without an Ark for wretched Man's abode,
And ebbs but to reflow!--Renew thy rainbow, God![nv]
XCIII.
What from this barren being do we reap?[473]
Our senses narrow, and our reason frail,
Life short, and truth a gem which loves the deep,
And all things weighed in Custom's falsest scale;[474]
Opinion an Omnipotence,--whose veil
Mantles the earth with darkness, until right
And wrong are accidents, and Men grow pale
Lest their own judgments should become too bright,
And their free thoughts be crimes, and Earth have too much light.
XCIV.
And thus they plod in sluggish misery,[nw]
Rotting from sire to son, and age to age,[475]
Proud of their trampled nature, and so die,[nx]
Bequeathing their hereditary rage
To the new race of inborn slaves, who wage
War for their chains, and rather than be free,
Bleed gladiator-like, and still engage
Within the same Arena where they see
Their fellows fall before, like leaves of the same tree.
XCV.
I speak not of men's creeds--they rest between
Man and his Maker--but of things allowed,
Averred, and known, and daily, hourly seen--
The yoke that is upon us doubly bowed,
And the intent of Tyranny avowed,
The edict of Earth's rulers, who are grown
The apes of him who humbled once the proud,
And shook them from their slumbers on the throne;
Too glorious, were this all his mighty arm had done.
XCVI.
Can tyrants but by tyrants conquered be,
And Freedom find no Champion and no Child[476]
Such as Columbia saw arise when she
Sprung forth a Pallas, armed and undefined?
Or must such minds be nourished in the wild,
Deep in the unpruned forest, 'midst the roar[ny]
Of cataracts, where nursing Nature smiled
On infant Washington? Has Earth no more
Such seeds within her breast, or Europe no such shore?
XCVII.
But France got drunk with blood to vomit crime;[nz]
And fatal have her Saturnalia been[oa]
To Freedom's cause, in every age and clime;
Because the deadly days which we have seen,
And vile Ambition, that built up between
Man and his hopes an adamantine wall,
And the base pageant[477] last upon the scene,
Are grown the pretext for the eternal thrall
Which nips Life's tree, and dooms Man's worst--his second fall.[478]
XCVIII.
Yet, Freedom! yet thy banner, torn, but flying,
Streams like the thunder-storm _against_ the wind;[479]
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,
But the sap lasts,--and still the seed we find
Sown deep, even in the bosom of the North;
So shall a better spring less bitter fruit bring forth.
XCIX.
There is a stern round tower of other days[480]
Firm as a fortress, with its fence of stone,
Such as an army's baffled strength delays,
Standing with half its battlements alone,
And with two thousand years of ivy grown,
The garland of Eternity, where wave
The green leaves over all by Time o'erthrown;--
What was this tower of strength? within its cave
What treasure lay so locked, so hid?--A woman's grave.[ob]
C.
But who was she, the Lady of the dead,
Tombed in a palace? Was she chaste and fair?
Worthy a king's--or more--a Roman's bed?
What race of Chiefs and Heroes did she bear?
What daughter of her beauties was the heir?
How lived--how loved--how died she? Was she not
So honoured--and conspicuously there,
Where meaner relics must not dare to rot,
Placed to commemorate a more than mortal lot?
CI.
Was she as those who love their lords, or they
Who love the lords of others? such have been
Even in the olden time, Rome's annals say.
Was she a matron of Cornelia's mien,
Or the light air of Egypt's graceful Queen,
Profuse of joy--or 'gainst it did she war,
Inveterate in virtue? Did she lean
To the soft side of the heart, or wisely bar
Love from amongst her griefs?--for such the affections are.[oc]
CII.
Perchance she died in youth--it may be, bowed
With woes far heavier than the ponderous tomb
That weighed upon her gentle dust: a cloud
Might gather o'er her beauty, and a gloom
In her dark eye, prophetic of the doom
Heaven gives its favourites[481]--early death--yet shed
A sunset charm around her, and illume
With hectic light, the Hesperus of the dead,
Of her consuming cheek the autumnal leaf-like red.
CIII.
Perchance she died in age--surviving all,
Charms--kindred--children--with the silver gray
On her long tresses, which might yet recall,
It may be, still a something of the day
When they were braided, and her proud array
And lovely form were envied, praised, and eyed
By Rome--But whither would Conjecture stray?[482]
Thus much alone we know--Metella died,
The wealthiest Roman's wife: Behold his love or pride!
CIV.
I know not why--but standing thus by thee
It seems as if I had thine inmate known,
Thou Tomb! and other days come back on me
With recollected music, though the tone
Is changed and solemn, like the cloudy groan
Of dying thunder on the distant wind;
Yet could I seat me by this ivied stone
Till I had bodied forth the heated mind[od]
Forms from the floating wreck which Ruin leaves behind:
CV.
And from the planks, far shattered o'er the rocks,
Built me a little bark of hope, once more
To battle with the Ocean and the shocks
Of the loud breakers, and the ceaseless roar
Which rushes on the solitary shore
Where all lies foundered that was ever dear:
But could I gather from the wave-worn store
Enough for my rude boat, where should I steer?
There woos no home, nor hope, nor life, save what is here.[oe]
CVI.
Then let the Winds howl on! their harmony
Shall henceforth be my music, and the Night
The sound shall temper with the owlets' cry,
As I now hear them, in the fading light
Dim o'er the bird of darkness' native site,
Answering each other on the Palatine,
With their large eyes, all glistening gray and bright,
And sailing pinions.--Upon such a shrine
What are our petty griefs?--let me not number mine.
CVII.
Cypress and ivy, weed and wallflower grown[483]
Matted and massed together--hillocks heaped
On what were chambers--arch crushed, column strown
In fragments--choked up vaults, and frescos steeped
In subterranean damps, where the owl peeped,[of]
Deeming it midnight:--Temples--Baths--or Halls?
Pronounce who can: for all that Learning reaped
From her research hath been, that these are walls--
Behold the Imperial Mount! 'tis thus the Mighty falls.[484]
CVIII.
There is the moral of all human tales;[485]
'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,
First Freedom, and then Glory--when that fails,
Wealth--Vice--Corruption,--Barbarism at last.
And History, with all her volumes vast,
Hath but _one_ page,--'tis better written here,
Where gorgeous Tyranny hath thus amassed
All treasures, all delights, that Eye or Ear,
Heart, Soul could seek--Tongue ask--Away with words! draw near,
CIX.
Admire--exult--despise--laugh--weep,--for here
There is such matter for all feeling:--Man![og]
Thou pendulum betwixt a smile and tear,
Ages and Realms are crowded in this span,
This mountain, whose obliterated plan
The pyramid of Empires pinnacled,
Of Glory's gewgaws shining in the van[oh]
Till the Sun's rays with added flame were filled!
Where are its golden roofs?[486] where those who dared to build?
CX.
Tully was not so eloquent as thou,
Thou nameless column[487] with the buried base!
What are the laurels of the Caesar's brow?
Crown me with ivy from his dwelling-place.
Whose arch or pillar meets me in the face,
Titus or Trajan's? No--'tis that of Time:
Triumph, arch, pillar, all he doth displace[oi]
Scoffing; and apostolic statues[488] climb
To crush the imperial urn, whose ashes slept sublime,
CXI.
Buried in air, the deep blue sky of Rome,
And looking to the stars: they had contained
A Spirit which with these would find a home,
The last of those who o'er the whole earth reigned,
The Roman Globe--for, after, none sustained,
But yielded back his conquests:--he was more
Than a mere Alexander, and, unstained
With household blood and wine, serenely wore
His sovereign virtues--still we Trajan's[489] name adore.
CXII.
Where is the rock of Triumph,[490] the high place
Where Rome embraced her heroes?--where the steep
Tarpeian?--fittest goal of Treason's race,
The Promontory whence the Traitor's Leap[oj]
Cured all ambition?[491] Did the conquerors heap
Their spoils here? Yes; and in yon field below,
A thousand years of silenced factions sleep--
The Forum, where the immortal accents glow,
And still the eloquent air breathes-burns with Cicero![ok][492]
CXIII.
The field of Freedom--Faction--Fame--and Blood:
Here a proud people's passions were exhaled,
From the first hour of Empire in the bud
To that when further worlds to conquer failed;
But long before had Freedom's face been veiled,
And Anarchy assumed her attributes;
Till every lawless soldier who assailed
Trod on the trembling Senate's slavish mutes,
Or raised the venal voice of baser prostitutes.
CXIV.
Then turn we to her latest Tribune's name,
From her ten thousand tyrants turn to thee,
Redeemer of dark centuries of shame--
The friend of Petrarch--hope of Italy--
Rienzi! last of Romans![493] While the tree
Of Freedom's withered trunk puts forth a leaf,
Even for thy tomb a garland let it be--
The Forum's champion, and the people's chief--
Her new-born Numa thou--with reign, alas! too brief.
CXV.
Egeria! sweet creation of some heart[27.H.]
Which found no mortal resting-place so fair
As thine ideal breast; whate'er thou art
Or wert,--a young Aurora of the air,
The nympholepsy[494] of some fond despair--[ol]
Or--it might be--a Beauty of the earth,
Who found a more than common Votary there
Too much adoring--whatsoe'er thy birth,
Thou wert a beautiful Thought, and softly bodied forth.
CXVI.
The mosses of thy Fountain[495] still are sprinkled
With thine Elysian water-drops; the face
Of thy cave-guarded Spring, with years unwrinkled,
Reflects the meek-eyed Genius of the place,
Whose green, wild margin now no more erase
Art's works; nor must the delicate waters sleep
Prisoned in marble--bubbling from the base
Of the cleft statue, with a gentle leap
The rill runs o'er--and round, fern, flowers, and ivy, creep
CXVII.
Fantastically tangled: the green hills
Are clothed with early blossoms--through the grass
The quick-eyed lizard rustles--and the bills
Of summer-birds sing welcome as ye pass;
Flowers fresh in hue, and many in their class,
Implore the pausing step, and with their dyes
Dance in the soft breeze in a fairy mass;
The sweetness of the Violet's deep blue eyes,
Kissed by the breath of heaven, seems coloured by its skies.[496]
CXVIII.
Here didst thou dwell, in this enchanted cover,[497]
Egeria! thy all heavenly bosom beating
For the far footsteps of thy mortal lover;
The purple Midnight veiled that mystic meeting
With her most starry canopy[498]--and seating
Thyself by thine adorer, what befel?
This cave was surely shaped out for the greeting
Of an enamoured Goddess, and the cell
Haunted by holy Love--the earliest Oracle!
CXIX.
And didst thou not, thy breast to his replying,
Blend a celestial with a human heart;[om]
And Love, which dies as it was born, in sighing,
Share with immortal transports? could thine art
Make them indeed immortal, and impart
The purity of Heaven to earthly joys,
Expel the venom and not blunt the dart--
The dull satiety which all destroys--
And root from out the soul the deadly weed which cloys?
CXX.
Alas! our young affections run to waste,
Or water but the desert! whence arise
But weeds of dark luxuriance, tares of haste,
Rank at the core, though tempting to the eyes
Flowers whose wild odours breathe but agonies,
And trees whose gums are poison; such the plants
Which spring beneath her steps as Passion flies
O'er the World's wilderness, and vainly pants
For some celestial fruit forbidden to our wants.
CXXI.
Oh, Love! no habitant of earth thou art--[on]
An unseen Seraph, we believe in thee,--
A faith whose martyrs are the broken heart,--
But never yet hath seen, nor e'er shall see
The naked eye, thy form, as it should be;[499]
The mind hath made thee, as it peopled Heaven,
Even with its own desiring phantasy,
And to a thought such shape and image given,
As haunts the unquenched soul--parched--wearied--wrung--and riven.
CXXII.
Of its own beauty is the mind diseased,
And fevers into false creation:--where,
Where are the forms the sculptor's soul hath seized?
In him alone. Can Nature show so fair?
Where are the charms and virtues which we dare
Conceive in boyhood and pursue as men,
The unreached Paradise of our despair,
Which o'er-informs[500] the pencil and the pen,
And overpowers the page where it would bloom again?
CXXIII.
Who loves, raves[501]--'tis youth's frenzy--but the cure
Is bitterer still, as charm by charm unwinds
Which robed our idols, and we see too sure
Nor Worth nor Beauty dwells from out the mind's
Ideal shape of such; yet still it binds
The fatal spell, and still it draws us on,
Reaping the whirlwind from the oft-sown winds;
The stubborn heart, its alchemy begun,
Seems ever near the prize--wealthiest when most undone.
CXXIV.
We wither from our youth, we gasp away--
Sick--sick; unfound the boon--unslaked the thirst,
Though to the last, in verge of our decay,
Some phantom lures, such as we sought at first--
But all too late,--so are we doubly curst.
Love, Fame, Ambition, Avarice--'tis the same,
Each idle--and all ill--and none the worst--
For all are meteors with a different name,[oo]
And Death the sable smoke where vanishes the flame.
CXXV.
Few--none--find what they love or could have loved,
Though accident, blind contact, and the strong
Necessity of loving, have removed
Antipathies--but to recur, ere long,
Envenomed with irrevocable wrong;
And Circumstance, that unspiritual God
And Miscreator, makes and helps along
Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod,[502]
Whose touch turns Hope to dust,--the dust we all have trod.
CXXVI.
Our life is a false nature--'tis not in
The harmony of things,--this hard decree,
This uneradicable taint of Sin,
This boundless Upas, this all-blasting tree,
Whose root is Earth--whose leaves and branches be
The skies which rain their plagues on men like dew--
Disease, death, bondage--all the woes we see,
And worse, the woes we see not--which throb through
The immedicable soul,[503] with heart-aches ever new.
CXXVII.
Yet let us ponder boldly--'tis a base
Abandonment of reason[504] to resign
Our right of thought--our last and only place
Of refuge; this, at least, shall still be mine:
Though from our birth the Faculty divine
Is chained and tortured--cabined, cribbed, confined,
And bred in darkness,[505] lest the Truth should shine
Too brightly on the unprepared mind,
The beam pours in--for Time and Skill will couch the blind.
CXXVIII.
Arches on arches![506] as it were that Rome,
Collecting the chief trophies of her line,
Would build up all her triumphs in one dome,
Her Coliseum stands;[507] the moonbeams shine
As 'twere its natural torches--for divine
Should be the light which streams here,--to illume
This long-explored but still exhaustless mine
Of Contemplation; and the azure gloom
Of an Italian night, where the deep skies assume
CXXIX.
Hues which have words, and speak to ye of Heaven,
Floats o'er this vast and wondrous monument,
And shadows forth its glory. There is given
Unto the things of earth, which Time hath bent,
A Spirit's feeling, and where he hath leant
His hand, but broke his scythe, there is a power
And magic in the ruined battlement,
For which the Palace of the present hour
Must yield its pomp, and wait till Ages are its dower.
CXXX.
Oh, Time! the Beautifier of the dead,
Adorner of the ruin[508]--Comforter
And only Healer when the heart hath bled;
Time! the Corrector where our judgments err,
The test of Truth, Love--sole philosopher,
For all beside are sophists--from thy thrift,
Which never loses though it doth defer--
Time, the Avenger! unto thee I lift
My hands, and eyes, and heart, and crave of thee a gift:
CXXXI.
Amidst this wreck, where thou hast made a shrine
And temple more divinely desolate--
Among thy mightier offerings here are mine,
Ruins of years--though few, yet full of fate:--
If thou hast ever seen me too elate,
Hear me not; but if calmly I have borne
Good, and reserved my pride against the hate
Which shall not whelm me, let me not have worn
This iron in my soul in vain--shall _they_ not mourn?
CXXXII.
And Thou, who never yet of human wrong
Left the unbalanced scale, great Nemesis![509][28.H.]
Here, where the ancient paid thee homage long--
Thou, who didst call the Furies from the abyss,
And round Orestes bade them howl and hiss
For that unnatural retribution--just,
Had it but been from hands less near--in this
Thy former realm, I call thee from the dust!
Dost thou not hear my heart?--Awake! thou shalt, and must.
CXXXIII.
It is not that I may not have incurred,
For my ancestral faults or mine, the wound[op]
I bleed withal; and, had it been conferred
With a just weapon, it had flowed unbound;
But now my blood shall not sink in the ground--
To thee I do devote it--_Thou_ shalt take
The vengeance, which shall yet be sought and found--
Which if _I_ have not taken for the sake--
But let that pass--I sleep--but Thou shalt yet awake.
CXXXIV.
And if my voice break forth, 'tis not that now[oq]
I shrink from what is suffered: let him speak
Who hath beheld decline upon my brow,
Or seen my mind's convulsion leave it weak;
But in this page a record will I seek.
Not in the air shall these my words disperse,
Though I be ashes; a far hour shall wreak
The deep prophetic fulness of this verse,
And pile on human heads the mountain of my curse!
CXXXV.
That curse shall be Forgiveness.--Have I not--
Hear me, my mother Earth! behold it, Heaven!--
Have I not had to wrestle with my lot?
Have I not suffered things to be forgiven?
Have I not had my brain seared, my heart riven,
Hopes sapped, name blighted, Life's life lied away?
And only not to desperation driven,
Because not altogether of such clay
As rots into the souls of those whom I survey.
CXXXVI.[or]
From mighty wrongs to petty perfidy
Have I not seen what human things could do?
From the loud roar of foaming calumny
To the small whisper of the as paltry few--
And subtler venom of the reptile crew,
The Janus glance[510] of whose significant eye,
Learning to lie with silence, would _seem_ true--
And without utterance, save the shrug or sigh,
Deal round to happy fools its speechless obloquy.
CXXXVII.
But I have lived, and have not lived in vain:
My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire,
And my frame perish even in conquering pain;
But there is that within me which shall tire
Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire;
Something unearthly, which they deem not of,
Like the remembered tone of a mute lyre,
Shall on their softened spirits sink, and move
In hearts all rocky now the late remorse of Love.
CXXXVIII.
The seal is set.--Now welcome, thou dread Power!
Nameless, yet thus omnipotent, which here
Walk'st in the shadow of the midnight hour
With a deep awe, yet all distinct from fear;
Thy haunts are ever where the dead walls rear
Their ivy mantles, and the solemn scene
Derives from thee a sense so deep and clear
That we become a part of what has been,
And grow upon the spot--all-seeing but unseen.
CXXXIX.
And here the buzz of eager nations ran,
In murmured pity, or loud-roared applause,
As man was slaughtered by his fellow man.
And wherefore slaughtered? wherefore, but because
Such were the bloody Circus' genial laws,
And the imperial pleasure.--Wherefore not?
What matters where we fall to fill the maws
Of worms--on battle-plains or listed spot?
Both are but theatres--where the chief actors rot.
CXL.
I see before me the Gladiator[511] lie:
He leans upon his hand--his manly brow[os]
Consents to death, but conquers agony,
And his drooped head sinks gradually low--
And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow
From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one,[ot]
Like the first of a thunder-shower; and now[ou]
The arena swims around him--he is gone,[ov]
Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hailed the wretch who won.
CXLI.
He heard it, but he heeded not--his eyes
Were with his heart--and that was far away;
He recked not of the life he lost nor prize,
But where his rude hut by the Danube lay--
_There_ were his young barbarians all at play,
_There_ was their Dacian mother--he, their sire,
Butchered to make a Roman holiday--[ow][29.H.]
All this rushed with his blood--Shall he expire
And unavenged?--Arise! ye Goths, and glut your ire!
CXLII.
But here, where Murder breathed her bloody 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--[ox][30.H.]
My voice sounds much--and fall the stars' faint rays[oy]
On the arena void--seats crushed--walls bowed--
And galleries, where my steps seem echoes strangely loud.
CXLIII.
A Ruin--yet what Ruin! from its mass
Walls--palaces--half-cities, have been reared;
Yet oft the enormous skeleton ye pass,[oz]
And marvel where the spoil could have appeared.
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.
CXLIV.
But when the rising moon begins to climb
Its topmost arch, and gently pauses there--
When the stars twinkle through the loops of Time,
And the low night-breeze waves along the air
The garland-forest, which the gray walls wear,[pa]
Like laurels on the bald first Caesar's head--[512]
When the light shines serene but doth not glare--
Then in this magic circle raise the dead;--
Heroes have trod this spot--'tis on their dust ye tread.[pb]
CXLV.
"While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand:[513]
When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall;
And when Rome falls--the World." From our own land
Thus spake the pilgrims o'er this mighty wall
In Saxon times, which we are wont to call
Ancient; and these three mortal things are still
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.
CXLVI.
Simple, erect, severe, austere, sublime--[514]
Shrine of all saints and temple of all Gods,
From Jove to Jesus--spared and blest by Time--
Looking tranquillity, while falls or nods
Arch--empire--each thing round thee--and Man plods
His way through thorns to ashes--glorious Dome!
Shalt thou not last? Time's scythe and Tyrants' rods
Shiver upon thee--sanctuary and home
Of Art and Piety--Pantheon!--pride of Rome![pc]
CXLVII.
Relic of nobler days, and noblest arts!
Despoiled yet perfect! with thy circle spreads
A holiness appealing to all hearts;
To Art a model--and to him who treads
Rome for the sake of ages, Glory sheds
Her light through thy sole aperture; to those
Who worship, here are altars for their beads--
And they who feel for Genius may repose
Their eyes on honoured forms, whose busts around them close.[515]
CXLVIII.
There is a dungeon, in whose dim drear light[516]
What do I gaze on? Nothing--Look again!
Two forms are slowly shadowed on my sight--
Two insulated phantoms of the brain:[pd]
It is not so--I see them full and plain--
An old man, and a female young and fair,
Fresh as a nursing mother, in whose vein
The blood is nectar:--but what doth she there,
With her unmantled neck, and bosom white and bare?[pe]
CXLIX.
Full swells the deep pure fountain of young life,
Where _on_ the heart and _from_ the heart we took
Our first and sweetest nurture--when the wife,
Blest into mother, in the innocent look,
Or even the piping cry of lips that brook[pf]
No pain and small suspense, a joy perceives[pg]
Man knows not--when from out its cradled nook
She sees her little bud put forth its leaves--
What may the fruit be yet?--I know not--Cain was Eve's.
CL.
But here Youth offers to Old Age the food,
The milk of his own gift: it is her Sire
To whom she renders back the debt of blood
Born with her birth:--No--he shall not expire
While in those warm and lovely veins the fire
Of health and holy feeling can provide
Great Nature's Nile, whose deep stream rises higher
Than Egypt's river:--from that gentle side
Drink--drink, and live--Old Man! Heaven's realm holds no such tide.
CLI.
The starry fable of the Milky Way[517]
Has not thy story's purity; it is
A constellation of a sweeter ray,
And sacred Nature triumphs more in this
Reverse of her decree, than in the abyss
Where sparkle distant worlds:--Oh, holiest Nurse!
No drop of that clear stream its way shall miss
To thy Sire's heart, replenishing its source[ph]
With life, as our freed souls rejoin the Universe.
CLII.
Turn to the Mole[518] which Hadrian reared on high,
Imperial mimic of old Egypt's piles,
Colossal copyist of deformity--
Whose travelled phantasy from the far Nile's
Enormous model, doomed the artist's toils
To build for Giants, and for his vain earth,
His shrunken ashes, raise this Dome: How smiles
The gazer's eye with philosophic mirth,[pi]
To view the huge design which sprung from such a birth!
CLIII.[519]
But lo! the Dome--the vast and wondrous Dome,[pj][520]
To which Diana's marvel was a cell--
Christ's mighty shrine above His martyr's tomb![pk]
I have beheld the Ephesian's miracle--[521]
Its columns strew the wilderness, and dwell
The hyaena and the jackal in their shade;[522]
I have beheld Sophia's bright roofs swell[pl]
Their glittering mass i' the Sun, and have surveyed[pm]
Its sanctuary the while the usurping Moslem prayed;[523]
CLIV.
But thou, of temples old, or altars new,
Standest alone--with nothing like to thee--
Worthiest of God, the Holy and the True!
Since Zion's desolation, when that He
Forsook his former city, what could be,
Of earthly structures, in His honour piled,
Of a sublimer aspect? Majesty--
Power--Glory--Strength--and Beauty all are aisled
In this eternal Ark of worship undefiled.
CLV.
Enter: its grandeur overwhelms thee not;
And why? it is not lessened--but thy mind,
Expanded by the Genius of the spot,
Has grown colossal, and can only find
A fit[524] abode wherein appear enshrined
Thy hopes of Immortality--and thou
Shalt one day, if found worthy, so defined
See thy God face to face, as thou dost now
His Holy of Holies--nor be blasted by his brow.[pn]
CLVI.
Thou movest--but increasing with the advance,[525]
Like climbing some great Alp, which still doth rise,
Deceived by its gigantic elegance--
Vastness which grows, but grows to harmonize--[po]
All musical in its immensities;
Rich marbles, richer painting--shrines where flame[pp]
The lamps of gold--and haughty dome which vies
In air with Earth's chief structures, though their frame
Sits on the firm-set ground--and this the clouds must claim.
CLVII.
Thou seest not all--but piecemeal thou must break,
To separate contemplation, the great whole;
And as the Ocean many bays will make
That ask the eye--so here condense thy soul
To more immediate objects, and control
Thy thoughts until thy mind hath got by heart
Its eloquent proportions, and unroll[pq]
In mighty graduations, part by part,
The Glory which at once upon thee did not dart,
CLVIII.
Not by its fault--but thine: Our outward sense[pr]
Is but of gradual grasp--and as it is
That what we have of feeling most intense
Outstrips our faint expression; even so this
Outshining and o'erwhelming edifice
Fools our fond gaze, and greatest of the great
Defies at first our Nature's littleness,
Till, growing with its growth, we thus dilate
Our Spirits to the size of that they contemplate.
CLIX.
Then pause, and be enlightened; there is more
In such a survey than the sating gaze
Of wonder pleased, or awe which would adore
The worship of the place, or the mere praise
Of Art and its great Masters, who could raise
What former time, nor skill, nor thought could plan:[ps]
The fountain of Sublimity displays
Its depth, and thence may draw the mind of Man[pt]
Its golden sands, and learn what great Conceptions can.[pu]
CLX.
Or, turning to the Vatican, go see
Laocooen's[526] torture dignifying pain--
A Father's love and Mortal's agony
With an Immortal's patience blending:--Vain
The struggle--vain, against the coiling strain
And gripe, and deepening of the dragon's grasp,
The Old Man's clench; the long envenomed chain[pv]
Rivets the living links,--the enormous Asp
Enforces pang on pang, and stifles gasp on gasp.[pw]
CLXI.
Or view the Lord of the unerring bow,[527]
The God of Life, and Poesy, and Light--
The Sun in human limbs arrayed, and brow
All radiant from his triumph in the fight;
The shaft hath just been shot--the arrow bright
With an Immortal's vengeance--in his eye
And nostril beautiful Disdain, and Might
And Majesty, flash their full lightnings by,
Developing in that one glance the Deity.
CLXII.
But in his delicate form--a dream of Love,[528]
Shaped by some solitary Nymph, whose breast
Longed for a deathless lover from above,
And maddened in that vision[529]--are exprest
All that ideal Beauty ever blessed
The mind with in its most unearthly mood,
When each Conception was a heavenly Guest--
A ray of Immortality--and stood,
Starlike, around, until they gathered to a God![px]
CLXIII.
And if it be Prometheus stole from Heaven
The fire which we endure[530]--it was repaid
By him to whom the energy was given
Which this poetic marble hath arrayed
With an eternal Glory--which, if made
By human hands, is not of human thought--
And Time himself hath hallowed it, nor laid
One ringlet in the dust--nor hath it caught
A tinge of years, but breathes the flame with which 'twas wrought.
CLXIV.
But where is he, the Pilgrim of my Song,
The Being who upheld it through the past?
Methinks he cometh late and tarries long.
He is no more--these breathings are his last--
His wanderings done--his visions ebbing fast,
And he himself as nothing:--if he was
Aught but a phantasy, and could be classed
With forms which live and suffer--let that pass--
His shadow fades away into Destruction's mass,[py]
CLXV.
Which gathers shadow--substance--life, and all
That we inherit in its mortal shroud--
And spreads the dim and universal pall
Through which all things grow phantoms; and the cloud
Between us sinks and all which ever glowed,
Till Glory's self is twilight, and displays
A melancholy halo scarce allowed
To hover on the verge of darkness--rays
Sadder than saddest night, for they distract the gaze,
CLXVI.
And send us prying into the abyss,
To gather what we shall be when the frame
Shall be resolved to something less than this--
Its wretched essence; and to dream of fame,
And wipe the dust from off the idle name
We never more shall hear,--but never more,
Oh, happier thought! can we be made the same:--
It is enough in sooth that _once_ we bore
These fardels[531] of the heart--the heart whose sweat was gore.
CLXVII.
Hark! forth from the abyss a voice proceeds,[532]
A long low distant murmur of dread sound,
Such as arises when a nation bleeds
With some deep and immedicable wound;--
Through storm and darkness yawns the rending ground--
The gulf is thick with phantoms, but the Chief
Seems royal still, though with her head discrowned,
And pale, but lovely, with maternal grief--
She clasps a babe, to whom her breast yields no relief.
CLXVIII.
Scion of Chiefs and Monarchs, where art thou?
Fond Hope of many nations, art thou dead?
Could not the Grave forget thee, and lay low
Some less majestic, less beloved head?
In the sad midnight, while thy heart still bled,
The mother of a moment, o'er thy boy,
Death hushed that pang for ever: with thee fled
The present happiness and promised joy
Which filled the Imperial Isles so full it seemed to cloy.
CLXIX.
Peasants bring forth in safety.--Can it be,
Oh thou that wert so happy, so adored!
Those who weep not for Kings shall weep for thee,
And Freedom's heart, grown heavy, cease to hoard
Her many griefs for _One_; for she had poured
Her orisons for thee, and o'er thy head[pz]
Beheld her Iris.--Thou, too, lonely Lord,
And desolate Consort--vainly wert thou wed!
The husband of a year! the father of the dead!
CLXX.
Of sackcloth was thy wedding garment made;
Thy bridal's fruit is ashes[533]: in the dust
The fair-haired Daughter of the Isles is laid,
The love of millions! How we did entrust
Futurity to her! and, though it must
Darken above our bones, yet fondly deemed
Our children should obey her child, and blessed
Her and her hoped-for seed, whose promise seemed
Like stars to shepherd's eyes:--'twas but a meteor beamed.[534]
CLXXI.
Woe unto us--not her--for she sleeps well:[535]
The fickle reek of popular breath,[536] the tongue
Of hollow counsel, the false oracle,
Which from the birth of Monarchy hath rung
Its knell in princely ears, till the o'erstung
Nations have armed in madness--the strange fate
Which tumbles mightiest sovereigns,[537] and hath flung
Against their blind omnipotence a weight
Within the opposing scale, which crushes soon or late,--[qa]
CLXXII.
These might have been her destiny--but no--
Our hearts deny it: and so young, so fair,
Good without effort, great without a foe;
But now a Bride and Mother--and now _there!_
How many ties did that stern moment tear!
From thy Sire's to his humblest subject's breast
Is linked the electric chain of that despair,
Whose shock was as an Earthquake's,[538] and opprest
The land which loved thee so that none could love thee best.
CLXXIII.
Lo, Nemi![539] navelled in the woody hills
So far, that the uprooting Wind which tears
The oak from his foundation, and which spills
The Ocean o'er its boundary, and bears
Its foam against the skies, reluctant spares
The oval mirror of thy glassy lake;
And calm as cherished hate, its surface wears[qb]
A deep cold settled aspect nought can shake,
All coiled into itself and round, as sleeps the snake.
CLXXIV.
And near, Albano's scarce divided waves
Shine from a sister valley;--and afar[31.H.]
The Tiber winds, and the broad Ocean laves
The Latian coast where sprung the Epic war,
"Arms and the Man," whose re-ascending star
Rose o'er an empire:--but beneath thy right[540]
Tully reposed from Rome;--and where yon bar
Of girdling mountains intercepts the sight[qc]
The Sabine farm was tilled, the weary Bard's delight.
CLXXV.
But I forget.--My Pilgrim's shrine is won,
And he and I must part,--so let it be,--
His task and mine alike are nearly done;
Yet once more let us look upon the Sea;
The Midland Ocean breaks on him and me,
And from the Alban Mount we now behold
Our friend of youth, that Ocean, which when we
Beheld it last by Calpe's rock[541] unfold
Those waves, we followed on till the dark Euxine rolled
CLXXVI.
Upon the blue Symplegades:[32.H.] long years--
Long, though not very many--since have done
Their work on both; some suffering and some tears[qd]
Have left us nearly where we had begun:
Yet not in vain our mortal race hath run--
We have had our reward--and it is here,--
That we can yet feel gladdened by the Sun,
And reap from Earth--Sea--joy almost as dear
As if there were no Man to trouble what is clear.[542]
CLXXVII.
Oh! that the Desert were my dwelling-place,[543]
With one fair Spirit for my minister,
That I might all forget the human race,
And, hating no one, love but only her!
Ye elements!--in whose ennobling stir
I feel myself exalted--Can ye not
Accord me such a Being? Do I err
In deeming such inhabit many a spot?
Though with them to converse can rarely be our lot.
CLXXVIII.
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,[544] and feel
What I can ne'er express--yet can not all conceal.
CLXXIX.
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.[qe]
CLXXX.
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
For Earth's destruction thou dost all despise,
Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies--[545]
And send'st him, shivering in thy playful spray
And howling, to his Gods, where haply lies
His petty hope in some near port or bay,
And dashest him again to Earth:--there let him lay.[qf][546]
CLXXXI.
The armaments which thunderstrike the walls
Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake,
And Monarchs tremble in their Capitals,
The oak Leviathans,[547] whose huge ribs make[qg]
Their clay creator the vain title take
Of Lord of thee, and Arbiter of War--
These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake,
They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar
Alike the Armada's pride or spoils of Trafalgar.[548]
CLXXXII.
Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee--
Assyria--Greece--Rome--Carthage--what are they?[549]
Thy waters washed[550] them power while they were free,[qh]
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,[qi]
Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow--
Such as Creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now.
CLXXXIII.
Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form
Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,
Calm or convulsed--in breeze, or gale, or storm--
Icing the Pole, or in the torrid clime
Dark-heaving--boundless, endless, and sublime--
The image of Eternity-the throne[qj]
Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime[551]
The monsters of the deep are made--each Zone
Obeys thee--thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.
CLXXXIV.
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[552]
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.[553]
CLXXXV.
My task is done--my song hath ceased--my theme
Has died into an echo; it is fit[qk]
The spell should break of this protracted dream.
The torch shall be extinguished which hath lit
My midnight lamp--and what is writ, is writ,--
Would it were worthier! but I am not now
That which I have been--and my visions flit
Less palpably before me--and the glow
Which in my Spirit dwelt is fluttering, faint, and low.
CLXXXVI.
Farewell! a word that must be, and hath been--
A sound which makes us linger;--yet--farewell![ql]
Ye! who have traced the Pilgrim to the scene[qm]
Which is his last--if in your memories dwell
A thought which once was his--if on ye swell
A single recollection--not in vain
He wore his sandal-shoon, and scallop-shell;
Farewell! with _him_ alone may rest the pain,
If such there were--with _you_, the Moral of his Strain.[554]
FOOTNOTES:
[363] {319} _MS. D._, Byron's final fair copy, is in the possession
of the Lady Dorchester.
[364] {321} [Compare Canto IV. stanza clxiv.--
"But where is he, the Pilgrim of my Song....
He is no more--these breathings are his last."]
[365] {322} [His marriage. Compare the epigram, "On my Wedding-Day,"
sent in a letter to Moore, January 2, 1820--
"Here's a happy new year!--but with reason
I beg you'll permit me to say--
Wish me _many_ returns of the _season_,
But as _few_ as you please of the _day_."]
[366] {323} [Some fancy me no Chinese, because I am formed more like a
man than a monster; and others wonder to find one born five thousand
miles from England, endued with common sense.... He must be some
Englishman in disguise."--_The Citizen of the World; or a Series of
Letters from a Chinese Philosopher at London, to his Friends in the
East_, 1762, Letter xxxiii.]
[367] [_Vide ante_, Introduction to Canto IV., p. 315.]
[368] {324} [Antonio Canova, sculptor, 1757-1822; Vincenzo Monti,
1754-1828; Ugo Foscolo, 1776-1827 (see _Life_, p. 456, etc.); Ippolito
Pindemonte, 1753-1828 (see Letter to Murray, June 4, 1817), poets;
Ennius Quirinus Visconti, 1751-1818, the valuer of the Elgin marbles,
archaeologist; Giacomo Morelli, 1745-1819, bibliographer and scholar (the
architect Cosimo Morelli, born 1732, died in 1812); Leopoldo Conte de
Cicognara, 1767-1834, archaeologist; the Contessa Albrizzi, 1769?-1836,
authoress of _Ritratti di Uomini Illustri_ (see _Life_, pp. 331, 413,
etc.); Giuseppe Mezzofanti, 1774-1849, linguist; Angelo Mai (cardinal),
1782-1854, philologist; Andreas Moustoxides, 1787-1860, a Greek
archaeologist, who wrote in Italian; Francesco Aglietti (see _Life_, p.
378, etc.), 1757-1836; Andrea Vacca Berlinghieri, 1772-1826 (see _Life_,
p. 339).
For biographical essays on Monti, Foscolo, and Pindemonte, see "Essay on
the Present Literature of Italy" (Hobhouse's _Historical Illustrations
of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold_, 1818, pp. 347, _sq._). See, too,
_Italian Literature_, by R. Garnett, C.B., LL.D., 1898, pp. 333-337,
337-341, 341-342.]
[369] {325} [Shelley (notes M. Darmesteter), in his preface to the
_Prometheus Unbound_, "emploie le mot sans demander pardon." "The mass
of capabilities remains at every period materially the same; the
circumstances which awaken it to action perpetually change."
"Capability" in the sense of "undeveloped faculty or property; a
condition physical or otherwise, capable of being converted or turned to
use" (_N. Eng. Dict._), appertains rather to material objects. To apply
the term figuratively to the forces inherent in national character
savoured of a literary indecorum. Hence the apology.]
[370] [Addison, _Cato_, act v. sc. 1, line 3--
"It must be so--_Plato_, thou reason'st well!--
Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,
This longing after immortality?"]
[371] [Shelley chose this refrain as the motto to his unfinished lines
addressed to his infant son--
"My lost William, thou in whom
Some bright spirit lived----"]
[372] [Scott commented severely on this opprobrious designation of "the
great and glorious victory of Waterloo," in his critique on the Fourth
Canto, _Q. R._, No. xxxvii., April, 1818.]
[373] {326} [_The substance of some letters written by an Englishman
resident in Paris during the last Reign of the Emperor Napoleon_. 1816.
2 vols.]
[374] [In 1817.]
[375] {327}
[Venice and La Mira on the Brenta.
Copied, August, 1817.
Begun, June 26. Finished, July 29th. MS. M.]
[376] [Byron sent the first stanza to Murray, July 1, 1817, "the shaft
of the column as a specimen." Gifford, Frere, and many more to whom
Murray "ventured to show it," expressed their approval (_Memoir of John
Murray_, i. 385).
"'The Bridge of Sighs,'" he explains (i.e. _Ponte de' Sospiri_), "is
that which divides, or rather joins, the palace of the Doge to the
prison of the state." Compare _The Two Foscari_, act iv. sc. 1--
"In Venice '_but_'s' a traitor.
But me no '_buts_,' unless you would pass o'er
The Bridge which few repass."
This, however, is an anachronism. The Bridge of Sighs was built by
Antonio da Ponte, in 1597, more than a century after the death of
Francesco Foscari. "It is," says Mr. Ruskin, "a work of no merit and of
a late period, owing the interest it possesses chiefly to its pretty
name, and to the ignorant sentimentalism of Byron" (_Stones of Venice_,
1853, ii. 304; in. 359).]
[377] [Compare _Mysteries of Udolpho_, by Mrs. Ann Radcliffe, 1794, ii.
35, 36--
"Its terraces crowned with airy yet majestic fabrics ... appeared as if
they had been called up from the Ocean by the wand of an enchanter."]
[lb] {328} ----_throned on her Seventy Isles_.--[MS. M. altern. reading,
D.]
[378] Sabellicus, describing the appearance of Venice, has made use of
the above image, which would not be poetical were it not true.--"Quo fit
ut qui superne [ex specula aliqua eminentiore] urbem contempletur,
turritam telluris imaginem medio Oceano figuratam se putet inspicere."
[_De Venetae Urbis situ Narratio_, lib. i. _Ital. Ill. Script._, 1600, p.
4. Marcus Antonius Coccius Sabellicus (1436-1506) wrote, _inter alia_, a
_History of Venice_, published in folio in 1487, and _Rhapsodiae
Historiarum Enneades, a condito mundo, usque ad_ A.C. 1504. His
description of Venice (_vide supra_) was published after his death in
1527. Hofmann does not give him a good character: "Obiit A.C. 1506,
turpi morbo confectus, aetat. 70, relicto filio notho." But his [Greek:
Au)toepita/phion] implies that he was satisfied with himself.
"Quem non res hominum, non omnis ceperat aetas,
Scribentem capit haec Coccion urna brevis."
Cybele (sometimes written Cybelle and Cyb[=e]le), the "mother of the
Goddesses," was represented as wearing a mural crown--"coronamque
turritam gestare dicitur" (Albricus Phil., _De Imag. Deor._, xii.).
Venice with her tiara of proud towers is the earth-goddess Cybele,
having "suffered a sea-change."]
[lc] {329} _From spoils of many nations and the East_.--[MS. M., D.
erased.]
[379] ["Gems wrought into drinking-vessels, among which the least
precious were framed of turquoise, jasper, or amethyst ... unnumbered
jacinths, emeralds, sapphires, chrysolites, and topazes, and, lastly,
those matchless carbuncles which, placed on the High Altar of St.
Mark's, blazed with intrinsic light, and scattered darkness by their own
beams;--these are but a sample of the treasures which accrued to Venice"
(Villehardouin, lib. in. p. 129). (See _Sketches from Venetian History_,
1831, i. 161.)]
[380] [After the fall of Constantinople, in 1204, "the illustrious
Dandolo ... was permitted to tinge his buskins in the purple hue
distinctive of the Imperial Family, to claim exemption from all feudal
service to the Emperor, and to annex to the title of Doge of Venice the
proud style of Despot of Romania, and Lord of One-fourth and One-eighth
of the Roman Empire" (_ibid._, 1831, i. 167).]
[ld] _Monarchs sate down_----.--[D. erased.]
[381] [The gondoliers (see Hobhouse's note ii.) used to sing alternate
stanzas of the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, capping each other like the
shepherds in the _Bucolics_. The rival reciters were sometimes attached
to the same gondola; but often the response came from a passing
gondolier, a stranger to the singer who challenged the contest. Rogers,
in his _Italy_, laments the silence which greeted the swan-song of his
own gondolier--
"He sung,
As in the time when Venice was Herself,
Of Tancred and Erminia. On our oars
We rested; and the verse was verse divine!
We could not err--Perhaps he was the last--
For none took up the strain, none answer'd him;
And, when he ceased, he left upon my ear
A something like the dying voice of Venice!"
_The Gondola_ (_Poems_, 1852, ii. 79).
Compare, too, Goethe's "Letters from Italy," October 6, 1786: "This
evening I bespoke the celebrated _song_ of the mariners, who chaunt
Tasso and Ariosto to melodies of their own. This must actually be
ordered, as it is not to be heard as a thing of course, but rather
belongs to the half-forgotten traditions of former times. I entered a
gondola by moonlight, with one _singer_ before and the other behind me.
They _sing_ their _song_, taking up the verses alternately....
"Sitting on the shore of an island, on the bank of a canal, or on the
side of a boat, a gondolier will sing away with a loud penetrating
voice--the multitude admire force above everything--anxious only to be
heard as far as possible. Over the silent mirror it travels
far."--_Travels in Italy_, 1883, p. 73.]
[le] {330} _The pleasure-place of all festivity_.--[MS. M.]
[382] {331} [The Rialto, or Rivo alto, "the middle group of islands
between the shore and the mainland," on the left of the Grand Canal, was
the site of the original city, and till the sixteenth century its formal
and legal designation. The Exchange, or Banco Giro, was held in the
piazza, opposite the church of San Giacomo, which stands at the head of
the canal to the north of the Ponto di Rialto. It was on the Rialto that
Antonio rated Shylock about his "usances." "What news on the Rialto?"
asks Solanio (_Merchant of Venice_, act i. sc. 3, line 102; act iii. sc.
1, line 1). Byron uses the word symbolically for Venetian commerce.]
[383] [Pierre is the hero of Otway's _Venice Preserved_. Shylock and the
Moor stand where they did, but what of Pierre? If the name of
Otway--"master of the tragic art"--and the title of his
masterpiece--_Venice Preserved, or The Plot Discovered_ (first played
1682)--are not wholly forgotten, Pierre and Monimia and Belvidera have
"decayed," and are memorable chiefly as favourite characters of great
actors and actresses. Genest notes twenty revivals of the _Venice
Preserved_, which was played as late as October 27, 1837, when Macready
played "Pierre," and Phelps "Jaffier." "No play that I know," says
Hartley Coleridge (Essays, 1851, ii. 56), "gains so much by acting as
_Venice Preserved_.... Miss O'Neill, I well remember, made me weep with
Belvidera; but she would have done the same had she spoken in an unknown
tongue." Byron, who professed to be a "great admirer of Otway," in a
letter to Hodgson, August 22, 1811 (_Letters_, 1898, i. 339, note 1),
alludes to some lines from _Venice Preserved_ (act ii. sc. 3), which
seem to have taken his fancy. Two lines spoken by Belvidera (act ii.),
if less humorous, are more poetical--
"Oh, the day
Too soon will break, and wake us to our sorrow;
Come, come to bed, and bid thy cares Good night!"]
[384] {332} [Compare _The Dream_, i.--
"The mind can make
Substance, and people planets of its own
With beings brighter than have been, and give
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh."
The ideal personages of the poet's creations have the promise of
immortality. The ideal forms which people his imagination transfigure
and supplant the dull and grievous realities of his mortal being and
circumstance; but there are "things" more radiant, more enchanting
still, the "strong realities" of the heart and soul--hope, love, joy.
But they pass! We wake, and lo! it was a dream.]
[lf] _Denies to the dull trick of life_----.--[MS. erased.]
[385]
["In youth I wrote because my mind was full,
And now because I feel it growing dull."
_Don Juan_, Canto XIV. stanza x.
In youth the poet takes refuge, in the ideal world, from the crowd and
pressure of blissful possibilities; and in age, when hope is beyond
hope, he peoples the solitude with beings of the mind.]
[lg] {333} _And this worn feeling_----.--[Editions 1816-1891.]
[lh]
/ _springs_ \
_And, may be, that which_ { } ----.--[MS. M.]
\ _spreads_ /
[li] _Outshines our Fairies--things in shape and hue_.--[MS. M.]
[lj] {334} ----_and though I leave behind_.--[MS. M.]
[lk] _And make myself a home beside a softer sea_.--[MS. erased.]
[ll]
----_to pine_
_Albeit is not my nature, and I twine_.--[MS. M. erased]
[386] [In another mood he wrote to Murray (June 7, 1819), "I trust they
won't think of 'pickling, and bringing me home to Clod or Blunderbuss
Hall' [see _The Rivals_, act v. sc. 3]. I am sure my bones would not
rest in an English grave, or my clay mix with the earth of that
country." In this half-humorous outburst he deprecates, or pretends to
deprecate, the fate which actually awaited his remains--burial in the
family vault at Hucknall Torkard. There is, of course, no reference to a
public funeral and a grave in Westminster Abbey. In the next stanza (x.
line 1) he assumes the possibility of his being excluded from the Temple
of Fame; but there is, perhaps, a tacit reference to burial in the
Abbey. If the thought, as is probable, occurred to him, he veils it in a
metaphor.]
[387] {335} The answer of the mother of Brasidas, the Lacedaemonian
general, to the strangers who praised the memory of her son.
[[Greek: Brasi/das ga\r e~)n me\n a)ne\r a)gatho\s], polloi\ d'
e)kei/nou krei/ssones e)n te~| Spa/rte|]. Plutarchi _Moralia,
Apophthegmata Laconica_ (Tauchnitz, 1820), ii. 127.]
[lm] _The widowed Adriatic mourns her Doge_.--[MS. M erased.]
[388] [The Bucentaur, "the state barge in which, on Ascension Day, the
Doge of Venice used to wed the Adriatic by dropping a ring into it," was
broken up and rifled by the French in 1797 (note, by Rev. E. C. Owen,
_Childe Harold_, 1897, p. 197).
Compare Goethe's "Letters from Italy," October 5, 1786: "To give a
notion of the Bucentaur in one word, I should say that it is a
state-galley. The older one, of which we still have drawings, justified
this appellation still more than the present one, which, by its
splendour, makes us forget the original....
"The vessel is all ornament; we ought to say, it is overladen with
ornament; it is altogether one piece of gilt carving, for no other
use.... This state-galley is a good index to show what the Venetians
were, and what they considered themselves."--_Travels in Italy_, 1883,
p. 68.
Compare, too, Wordsworth's sonnet "On the Extinction of the Venetian
Republic"--
"She was a maiden City, bright and free;
No guile seduced, no force could violate;
And when she took unto herself a Mate,
She must espouse the everlasting Sea."
_Works_, 1888, p. 180.]
[389] {336} [For "Lion," see Hobhouse's note iii. The "Horses of St.
Mark" (_vide post_, stanza xiii. line 1), which, according to history or
legend, Augustus "conveyed" from Alexandria to Rome, Constantine from
Rome to Constantinople, Dandolo, in 1204, from Constantinople to Venice,
Napoleon, in 1797, from Venice to Paris, and which were restored to the
Venetians by the Austrians in 1815, were at one time supposed to belong
to the school of Lysippus. Haydon, who published, in 1817, a curious
etching of "The Elgin Horse's Head," placed side by side with the "Head
of one of the Horses ... now at Venice," subscribes the following
critical note: "It is astonishing that the great principles of nature
should have been so nearly lost in the time between Phidias and
Lysippus. Compare these two heads. The Elgin head is all truth, the
other all manner." Hobhouse pronounces the "Horses" to be "irrevocably
Chian," but modern archaeologists regard both "school" and exact period
as uncertain.]
[ln] _Even on the pillar_----.--[MS. M., D. erased.]
[390] [According to Milman (_Hist. of Lat. Christianity_, v. 144), the
humiliation of Barbarossa at the Church of St. Mark took place on
Tuesday, July 24, 1177. _A propos_ of the return of the Pope and Emperor
to the ducal palace, he quotes "a curious passage from a newly recovered
poem, by Godfrey of Viterbo, an attendant on the Emperor. So great was
the press in the market that the aged Pope was thrown down--
"Jam Papa perisset in arto,
Caesar ibi vetulum ni relevasset eum."
"This," he remarks, "is an odd contrast of real life with romance."]
[391] {337} ["Oh, for one hour of Dundee!" was the exclamation of a
Highland chieftain at the battle of Sheriff-muir, November 13, 1715
(Scott's _Tales of a Grandfather_, III. Series, chap. x.; _Prose Works_,
Paris, 1830, vii. 768). Wordsworth makes the words his own in the
sonnet, "In the Pass of Killicranky (an Invasion being expected,
October, 1803)" (_Works_, 1888, p. 201)--
"O for a single hour of that Dundee,
Who on that day the word of onset gave!"
And Coleridge, in a letter to Wordsworth (February 8, 1804), thinking,
perhaps, less of the chieftain than the sonnet, exclaims, "'Oh for one
hour of Dundee!' How often shall I sigh, 'Oh for one hour of _The
Recluse!_'"--an aspiration which Byron would have worded differently.]
[lo]
----_who quelled the imperial foe_.--[MS. M. erased.]
----_empire's all-conquering foe_.--[MS. M.]
[392] [Compare _Marino Faliero_, act iv. sc. 2, lines 157, 158--
"Doge Dandolo survived to ninety summers,
To vanquish empires, and refuse their crown."
"The vessels that bore the bishops of Soissons and Troyes, the
_Paradise_ and the _Pilgrim_, were the first which grappled with the
Towers of Constantinople [April, 1204].... The bishops of Soissons and
of Troyes would have placed the blind old Doge Dandolo on the imperial
throne; his election was opposed by the Venetians.... But probably the
wise patriotism of Dandolo himself, and his knowledge of the Venetian
mind, would make him acquiesce in the loss of an honour so dangerous to
his country.... Venice might have sunk to an outpost, as it were, of the
Eastern Empire."--Milman's _Hist. of Lat. Christianity_, v. 350, 353,
354.]
[393] {338} [Hobhouse's version (see _Hist. Notes_, No. vi.) of the war
of Chioggia is not borne out by modern research. For example, the long
speech which Chinazzo attributes to the Genoese admiral, Pietro Doria,
is probably mythical. The actual menace of the "bitting and bridling the
horses of St. Mark" is assigned by other historians to Francesco
Carrara. Doria was not killed by a stone bullet from the cannon named
The Trevisara, but by the fall of the Campanile in Chioggia, which had
been struck by the bullet. (_Venice, an Historical Sketch of the
Republic_, by Horatio F. Brown, 1893, pp. 225-234.)]
[lp] ----_into whence she rose_.--[Editions 1818-1891.]
[394] [Compare the opening lines of Byron's _Ode on Venice_--
"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!"
Shelley, too, in his _Lines written among the Euganean Hills_, bewailed
the approaching doom of the "sea-girt city." But threatened cities, like
threatened men, live long, and since its annexation to Italy, in 1866, a
revival of trade and the re-establishment of the arsenal have brought
back a certain measure of prosperity.]
[lq] {339} _Even in Destruction's heart_----.--[MS. M.]
[395] That is, the Lion of St. Mark, the standard of the republic, which
is the origin of the word Pantaloon--Piantaleone, Pantaleon, Pantaloon.
[The Venetians were nicknamed Pantaloni. Byron, who seems to have relied
on the authority of a Venetian glossary, assumes that the "by-word" may
be traced to the patriotism of merchant-princes "who were reputed to
hoist flags with the Venetian lion waving to the breeze on every rock
and barren headland of Levantine waters" (_Memoirs of Count Carlo
Gozzi_, translated by J. Addington Symonds, 1890, Introd. part ii. p.
44), and that in consequence of this spread-eagleism the Venetians were
held up to scorn by their neighbours as "planters of the lion"--a
reproach which conveyed a tribute to their prowess. A more probable
explanation is that the "by-word," with its cognates "Pantaleone," the
typical masque of Italian comedy--progenitor of our "Pantaloon;" and
"pantaloni," "pantaloons," the typical Venetian costume--derive their
origin from the baptismal name "Pantaleone," frequently given to
Venetian children, in honour of St. Pantaleon of Nicomedia, physician
and martyr, whose cult was much in vogue in Northern Italy, and
especially in Venice, where his relics, which "coruscated with
miracles," were the object of peculiar veneration.
St. Pantaleon was known to the Greek Church as [Greek: Pantelee/mon],
that is, the "all-pitiful;" and in Latin his name is spelled
_Pantaleymon_ and _Pantaleemon_. Hagiologists seem to have been puzzled,
but the compiler of the _Acta Sanctorum_, for July 27, St. Pantaleon's
Day in the Roman calendar (xxxiii. 397-426), gives the preference to
Pantaleon, and explains that he was hailed as Pantaleemon by a divine
voice at the hour of his martyrdom, which proclaimed "eum non amplius
esse vocandum Pantaleonem, sed Pantaleemonem."
The accompanying woodcut is the reproduction of the frontispiece of a
black-letter tract, composed by Augustinus de Crema, in honour of the
"translation" of one of the sainted martyr's arms to Crema, in Lombardy.
It was printed at Cremona, in 1493.]
[396] {340} Shakespeare is my authority for the word "Ottomite" for
Ottoman. "Which Heaven hath forbid the Ottomites" (see _Othello_, act
ii. sc. 3, line 161).--[MS. D.]
[397] ["On 29th September (1669) Candia, and the island of Candia,
passed away from Venice, after a defence which had lasted twenty-five
years, and was unmatched for bravery in the annals of the
Republic."--_Venice, an Historical Sketch_, by Horatio F. Brown, 1893,
p. 378.]
[398] ["The battle of Lepanto [October 7, 1571] lasted five hours....
The losses are estimated at 8000 Christians and 30,000 Turks.... The
chief glory of the victory rests with Sebastian Veniero and the
Venetians."--_Venice, etc._, 1893, p. 368.]
[399] {341} [The story is told in Plutarch's _Life of Nicias_, cap.
xxix. (_Plut. Vit_., Lipsiae, 1813, v. 154). "The dramas of Euripides
were so popular throughout all Sicily, that those Athenian prisoners who
knew ... portions of them, won the affections of their masters.... I
cannot refrain from mentioning this story, though I fear its
trustworthiness ... is much inferior to its pathos and
interest."--Grote's _History of Greece_, 1869, vii. 186.]
[lr] _And won her hopeless children from afar_.--[MS. M., D. erased.]
[ls]
_And sends him ransomeless to bless his poet's strains_.--[MS. M.]
or, _And sends him home to bless the poet for his strains_.--
[MS. D. erased.]
[lt] {342} _Thy love of Tassa's verse should cut the knot_.--[MS. M.]
[400] [By the Treaty of Paris, May 3, 1814, Lombardy and Venice, which
since the battle of Austerlitz had formed part of the French kingdom of
Naples, were once more handed over to Austria. Great Britain was
represented by "a bungler even in its disgusting trade" (_Don Juan_,
Dedication, stanza xiv.), Lord Castlereagh.]
[lu] ----_for come it will and shall_.--[MS. M., D. erased.]
[lv] _And Otway's--Radcliffe's--Schiller's--Shakspeare's art_.--[MS. M.,
D.]
[401] Venice Preserved; Mysteries of Udolpho; The Ghost-Seer, or
Armenian; The Merchant of Venice; Othello.
[For _Venice Preserved, vide ante_, stanza iv. line 7, note. To the
_Mysteries of Udolpho_ Byron was indebted for more than one suggestion,
_vide ante_, stanza i. line 4, note, and _Mysteries, etc._, London,
1794, 2. 39: "The air bore no sounds, but those of sweetness echoing
along each margin of the canal and from gondolas on its surface, while
groups of masks were seen dancing on the moonlit terraces, and seemed
almost to realize the romance of fairy-land." The scene of Schiller's
_Der Geisterseher_ (_Werke_, 1819, x. 97, _sq._) is laid at Venice.
"This [the Doge's palace] was the thing that most struck my imagination
in Venice--more than the Rialto, which I visited for the sake of
Shylock; and more, too, than Schiller's _Armenian_, a novel which took a
great hold of me when a boy. It is also called the _Ghost Seer_, and I
never walked down St. Mark's by moonlight without thinking of it, and
'at nine o'clock he died!' [For allusion to the same incident, see
Rogers's _Italy_ (_Poems_, 1852, ii. 73).] But I hate things _all
fiction_; and therefore the _Merchant_ and _Othello_ have no great
associations for me: but _Pierre_ has."--Letter to Murray, Venice, April
2, 1817. (For an earlier reference to the _Ghost-seer_, see _Oscar of
Alva: Poetical Works_, 1898, i. 131, note.)]
[lw] {344} _Though I have found her thus we will not part_.--[MS. M.]
[402] [Shelley, in his _Lines written among the Euganean Hills_, allows
to Venice one lingering glory "one remembrance more sublime"--
"That a tempest-cleaving swan
Of the songs of Albion,
Driven from his ancestral streams
By the might of evil dreams,
Found a nest in thee; and Ocean
Welcomed him with such emotion,
That its joy grew his, and sprung
From his lips like music flung
O'er a mighty thunder-fit,
Chastening terror."]
[lx]
_The Past at least is mine--whate'er may come_.
_But when the heart is full the lips must needs lie dumb_.--
[MS. M. erased.]
----_or else mine now were cold and dumb_.--[MS. M.]
[403] {344} _Tannen_ is the plural of _tanne_, a species of fir peculiar
to the Alps, which only thrives in very rocky parts, where scarcely soil
sufficient for its nourishment can be found. On these spots it grows to
a greater height than any other mountain tree.
[Byron did not "know German" (Letter to Murray, June 7, 1820), and he
may, as Mr. Tozer suggests, have supposed that the word "tannen" denoted
not "fir trees" generally, but a particular kind of fir tree. He refers,
no doubt, to the Ebeltanne (_Abies pectinata_), which is not a native of
this country, but grows at a great height on the Swiss Alps and
throughout the mountainous region of Central Europe.]
[ly] _But there are minds which as the Tannen grow_.--[MS. erased.]
[lz] _Of shrubless granite_----.--[MS. M. erased.]
[ma] {345} _In rocks and unsupporting places_----.--[MS. M. erased.]
[404] [Cicero, _De Finibus_, II. xxix., controverts the maxim of
Epicurus, that a great sorrow is necessarily of short duration, a
prolonged sorrow necessarily light: "Quod autem magnum dolorem brevem
longinquum levem esse dicitis, id non intelligo quale sit, video enim et
magnos et eosdem bene longinquos dolores." But the sentiment is adopted
by Montaigne (1. xiv.), ed. 1580, p. 66: "Tu ne la sentiras guiere long
temps, si tu la sens trop; elle mettra fin a soy ou a toy; l'un et
l'autre revient a un." ("Si tu ne la portes; elle t'emportera," note.)
And again by Sir Thomas Brown, "Sense endureth no extremities, and
sorrows destroy us or themselves" (see Darmesteter, _Childe Harold_,
1882, p. 193). Byron is not refining upon these conceits, but is drawing
upon his own experience. Suffering which does not kill is subject to
change, and "continueth not in one stay;" but it remains within call,
and returns in an hour when we are not aware.]
[405] {346} [Compare Bishop Blougram's lament on the instability of
unfaith--
"Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch,
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death,
A chorus-ending from Euripides,--
And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears.
* * * * *
To rap and knock and enter in our soul,
Take hands and dance there."
Browning's _Poetical Works_, 1869, v. 268.]
[mb]
_A tone of music--eventide in spring_.
or, ----_twilight--eve in spring_.--[MS. M, erased.]
[406] {347}
[Compare Scott's _Lady of the Lake_, I. xxxiii. lines 21, 22--
"They come, in dim procession led,
The cold, the faithless, and the dead."]
[407] {348} ["Friuli's mountains" are the Julian Alps, which lie to the
north of Trieste and north-east of Venice, "the hoar and aery Alps
towards the north," which Julian and Count Maddalo (_vide post_, p. 349)
saw from the Lido. But the Alpine height along which "a sea of glory"
streamed--"the peak of the far Rhaetian hill" (stanza xxviii. line
4)--must lie to the westward of Venice, in the track of the setting
sun.]
[408] The above description may seem fantastical or exaggerated to those
who have never seen an Oriental or an Italian sky; yet it is but a
literal and hardly sufficient delineation of an August evening (the
eighteenth), as contemplated in one of many rides along the banks of the
Brenta, near La Mira.
[Compare Shelley's _Julian and Maddalo_
(_Poetical Works_, 1895, i. 343)--
"How beautiful is sunset, when the glow
Of Heaven descends upon a land like thee,
Thou Paradise of exiles, Italy!
* * * * *
... We stood
Looking upon the evening, and the flood,
Which lay between the city and the shore,
Paved with the image of the sky ... the hoar
And aery Alps towards the north appeared,
Thro' mist, an heaven-sustaining bulwark reared
Between the East and West; and half the sky
Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry,
Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew
Down the steep West into a wondrous hue,
Brighter than burning gold."]
[409] {349} [The Brenta rises in Tyrol, and flowing past Padua falls
into the Lagoon at Fusina. Mira, or La Mira, where Byron "colonized" in
the summer of 1817, and again in 1819, is on the Brenta, some six or
seven miles inland from the Lagoon.]
[410] {350} [The Abbe de Sade, in his _Memoires pour la vie de
Petrarque_ (1767), affirmed, on the strength of documentary evidence,
that the Laura of the sonnets, born de Noves, was the wife of his
ancestor, Hugo de Sade, and the mother of a large family. "Gibbon," says
Hobhouse (note viii.), "called the abbe's memoirs a 'labour of love'
(see _Decline and Fall_, chap. lxx. note 1), and followed him with
confidence and delight;" but the poet James Beattie (in a letter to the
Duchess of Gordon, August 17, 1782) disregarded them as a "romance,"
and, more recently, "an ingenious Scotchman" [Alexander Fraser Tytler
(Lord Woodhouselee)], in an _Historical and Critical Essay on the Life
and Character of Petrarch_ (1810), had re-established "the ancient
prejudice" in favour of Laura's virginity. Hobhouse appears, but his
note is somewhat ambiguous, to adopt the view of "the ingenious
Scotchman." To pass to contemporary criticism, Dr. Garnett, in his
_History of Italian Literature_, 1898 (pp. 66-71), without attempting to
settle "the everlasting controversy," regards the abbe's documentary
evidence as for the most part worthless, and, relying on the internal
evidence of the sonnets and the dialogue, and on the facts of Petrarch's
life as established by his correspondence (a complete series of
Petrarch's letters was published by Giuseppe Fracassetti, in 1859),
inclines to the belief that it was the poet's status as a cleric, and
not a husband and family, which proved a bar to his union with Laura.
With regard, however, to "one piece of documentary evidence," namely,
Laura de Sade's will, Dr. Garnett admits that, if this were producible,
and, on being produced, proved genuine, the coincidence of the date of
the will, April 3, 1348, with a note in Petrarch's handwriting, dated
April 6, 1348, which records the death of Laura, would almost establish
the truth of the abbe's theory "in the teeth of all objections."]
[411] {351} ["He who would seek, as I have done, the last memorials of
the life and death of Petrarch in that sequestered Euganean village
[Arqua is about twelve miles south-west of Padua], will still find them
there. A modest house, apparently of great antiquity, passes for his
last habitation. A chair in which he is said to have died is shown
there. And if these details are uncertain, there is no doubt that the
sarcophagus of red marble, supported on pillars, in the churchyard of
Arqua, contains, or once contained, his mortal remains. Lord Byron and
Mr. Hobhouse visited the spot more than sixty years ago in a sceptical
frame of mind; for doubts had at that time been thrown on the very
existence of Laura; and the varied details of the poet's life, which are
preserved with so much fidelity in his correspondence, were almost
forgotten."--_Petrarch_, by H. Reeve, 1879, p. 14. In a letter to
Hoppner, September 12, 1817, Byron says that he was moved "to turn aside
in a second visit to Arqua." Two years later, October, 1819, he in vain
persuaded Moore "to spare a day or two to go with me to Arqua. I should
like," he said, "to visit that tomb with you--a pair of poetical
pilgrims--eh, Tom, what say you?" But "Tom" was for Rome and Lord John
Russell, and ever afterwards bewailed the lost opportunity "with wonder
and self-reproach" (_Life_, p. 423; _Life_, by Karl Elze, 1872, p.
235).]
[mc] {352} _His mansion and his monument_----.--[MS. M., D. erased.]
[md] ----_formed his sepulchral fane_.--[MS. M.]
[412]
[Compare Wordsworth's _Ode_, "Intimations of," etc., xi. lines 9-11--
"The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality."]
[413] ["Euganeis istis in collibus ... domum parvam sed delectabilem et
honestam struxi ... hic quanquam aeger corpore, tranquillus animo frater
dego, sine tumultibus, sine erroribus, sine curis, legens semper et
scribens, Deum laudans."--Petrarca, _Epistolae Seniles_, xiv. 6 (_Opera_,
Basileae, 1581, p. 938).
See, too, the notes to _Arqua_ (Rogers's _Italy: Poems_, 1852, ii.
105-109), which record the pilgrimage of other poets, Boccaccio and
Alfieri, to the great laureate's tomb; and compare with Byron's stanzas
the whole of that exquisite cameo, delicate and yet durable as if graved
on chalcedony.]
[me] {353} _Society's the school where taught to live._--[MS. M.
erased.]
[mf] ----_the soul with God must strive_.--[MS. M. erased.]
[414] The struggle is to the full as likely to be with demons as with
our better thoughts. Satan chose the wilderness for the temptation of
our Saviour. And our unsullied John Locke preferred the presence of a
child to complete solitude.
["He always chose to have company with him, if it were only a child; for
he loved children, and took pleasure in talking with those that had been
well trained" (_Life of John Locke_, by H. R. Fox-Bourne, ii. 537). Lady
Masham's daughter Esther, and "his wife" Betty Clarke, aged eleven
years, were among his child-friends.]
[mg] {354} _Which dies not nor can ever pass away_.--[MS. M. erased.]
[mh] _The tomb a hell--and life one universal gloom_.--[MS. M. erased.]
[415] [Byron passed a single day at Ferrara in April, 1817; went over
the castle, cell, etc., and a few days after wrote _The Lament of
Tasso_, the manuscript of which is dated April 20, 1817. The Fourth
Canto of _Childe Harold_ was not begun till the end of June in the same
year.]
[416] [Of the ancient family of Este, Marquesses of Tuscany, Azzo V. was
the first who obtained power in Ferrara in the twelfth century. A remote
descendant, Nicolo III. (b. 1384, d. 1441), founded the University of
Parma. He married for his second wife Parisina Malatesta (the heroine of
Byron's _Parisina_, published February, 1816), who was beheaded for
adultery in 1425. His three sons, Lionel (d. 1450), the friend of Poggio
Bracciolini; Borso (d. 1471), who established printing in his states;
and Ercolo (d. 1505), the friend of Boiardo,--were all patrons of
letters and fosterers of the Renaissance. Their successor, Alphonso I.
(1486-1534), who married Lucrezia Borgia, 1502, honoured himself by
attaching Ariosto to his court, and it was his grandson, Alphonso II.
(d. 1597), who first befriended and afterwards, on the score of lunacy,
imprisoned Tasso in the Hospital of Sant' Anna (1579-86).]
[417] {355} [It is a fact that Tasso was an involuntary inmate of the
Hospital of Sant' Anna at Ferrara for seven years and four months--from
March, 1579, to July, 1586--but the causes, the character, and the place
of his imprisonment have been subjects of legend and misrepresentation.
It has long been known and acknowledged (see Hobhouse's _Historical
Illustrations_, 1818, pp. 5-31) that a real or feigned passion for Duke
Alphonso's sister, Leonora d'Este, was not the cause or occasion of his
detention, and that the famous cell or dungeon ("nine paces by six, and
about seven high") was not "the original place of the poet's
confinement." It was, as Shelley says (see his letter to Peacock,
November 7, 1818), "a very decent dungeon;" but it was not Tasso's. The
setting of the story was admitted to be legendary, but the story itself,
that a poet was shut up in a madhouse because a vindictive magnate
resented his love of independence and impatience of courtly servitude,
was questioned, only to be reasserted as historical. The publication of
Tasso's letters by Guasti, in 1853, a review of Tasso's character and
career in Symonds's _Renaissance in Italy_, and, more recently, Signor
Angelo Solerti's monumental work, _Vita di Torquato Tasso_ (1895), which
draws largely upon the letters of contemporaries, the accounts of the
ducal court, and other documentary evidence, have in a great measure
exonerated the duke at the expense of the unhappy poet himself. Briefly,
Tasso's intrigues with rival powers--the Medici at Florence, the papal
court, and the Holy Office at Bologna--aroused the alarm and suspicion
of the duke, whilst his general demeanour and his outbursts of violence
and temper compelled, rather than afforded, a pretext for his
confinement. Before his final and fatal return to Ferrara, he had been
duly warned that he must submit to be treated as a person of disordered
intellect, and that if he continued to throw out hints of designs upon
his life and of persecution in high places, he would be banished from
the ducal court and dominions. But return he would, and at an
inauspicious moment, when the duke was preoccupied with the ceremonies
and festivities of a third marriage. No one attended to him or took heed
of his arrival; and, to quote his own words, "in a fit of madness" he
broke out into execrations of the ducal court and family, and of the
people of Ferrara. For the offence he was shut up in the Hospital of
Sant' Anna, and for many months treated as an ordinary lunatic. Of the
particulars of his treatment during these first eight months of his
confinement, apart from Tasso's own letters, there is no evidence. The
accounts of the hospital are lost, and the _Libri di spesa_ (_R. Arch.
di Stato in Modena_; _Camer. Ducale: Casa_; _Amministrazione_, Solerti,
iii. _Docu_. 47) do not commence till November 20, 1579. Two years
later, the _Libri di spenderia_ (Solerti, in. _Docu_. 51), from January,
1582, onward, show that he was put on a more generous diet; and it is
known that a certain measure of liberty and other indulgences were
gradually accorded. There can, however, be little doubt that for many
months his food was neglected and medical attendance withheld. His
statement, that he was denied the rites of the Church, cannot be
gainsaid. He was regarded as a lunatic, and, as such, he would not be
permitted either to make his confession or to communicate. Worse than
all, there was the terrible solitude. "E sovra tutto," he writes (May,
1580), "m'affligge la solitudine, mia crudele e natural nimica." No
wonder the attacks of delirium, the "unwonted lights," the conference
with a familiar spirit, followed in due course. Byron and Shelley were
ignorant of the facts; and we know that their scorn and indignation were
exaggerated and misplaced. But the "pity of it" remains, that the grace
and glory of his age was sacrificed to ignorance and fear, if not to
animosity and revenge. (See _Tasso_, by E. J. Hasell; _History of the
Italian Renaissance_, by J. A. Symonds; _Quart. Rev._, October, 1895,
No. 364, art. x.; _Vita di Torquato Tasso_, 1895, i. 312-314, 410-412,
etc.)]
[mi] {357} _And thou for no one useful purpose born_.--[MS. M. erased.]
[418] [Solerti (_Vita_, i. 418) combats the theory advanced by Hobhouse
(see _note_ x.), that Lionardo Salviati, in order to curry favour with
Alphonso, was responsible for "the opposition which the Jerusalem
encountered from the Cruscan Academy." He assigns their unfavourable
criticism to literary sentiment or prejudice, and not to personal
animosity or intrigue. The _Gerusalemme Liberata_ was dedicated to the
glory of the house of Este; and, though the poet was in disgrace, the
duke was not to be propitiated by an attack upon the poem. Moreover,
Salviati did not publish his theses in his own name, but under a _nom de
guerre_, "L'Infarinato."]
[mj] {358} _And baffled Gaul whose rancour could allow_.--[MS. M.
erased.]
[mk] _Which grates upon the teeth_----.--[MS. M. erased.]
[419] [Hobhouse, in his note x., quotes Boileau, but not in full. The
passage runs thus--
"Tous les jours, a la cour, un sot de qualite
Peut juger de travers avec impunite,
A Malherbe, a Racan, prefere Theophile,
Et le clinquant du Tasse a tout l'or de Virgile."