_Stanza in "Childe Harold"_ (Vol. viii., p.258.).--I fear that, considering
Lord Byron's cacography and carelessness, a reference to his MS. would not
mend the matter much; as, although the stanza undoubtedly contains some
errors due to the printer or transcriber for the press, the obscurity and
unconnected language are his lordship's own, and nothing short of a
complete recast could improve it materially: however, to make the verses
such as Byron most probably wrote them, an alteration of little more than
_one letter_ is required. For "wasted," read "washed;" to supply the
deficient syllable, insert "yet" or "still" after "they," and remove the
semicolon in the next line from the middle to the end of the verse. Then
the stanza runs thus:
"Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee;
Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, where are they?
Thy waters wash'd them while they yet were free,
And many a tyrant since their shores obey,
The stranger, slave, or savage--their decay
Has dried up realms to deserts," &c.
The sentiment is clear enough, although not well expressed; and the use of
the present tense, "obey," for "have obeyed," is not at all warranted by
the usage of our language. In plain prose, it means--
"Thy waters washed their shores while they were independent, and do so
still, although many a race of tyrants has successively reigned over
them since then: their decay has converted many fertile regions to
wildernesses, but thou art still unchanged."
Not having your earlier volumes at hand, I cannot be sure that these
conjectures of mine are original (the correction in the punctuation of the
fourth line certainly is not), and have only to request the {482}
forbearance of any of your correspondents whose "thunder" I may have
unwittingly appropriated.