The Works of Lord Byron. Vol. 2
Chapter 12
Grand Chêne.--_Historic Studies_, ii. 210, 218, 219.
Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) finished (1788) _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ at "La Grotte, an ancient and spacious mansion behind the church of St. Francis, at Lausanne," which was demolished by the Swiss authorities in 1879. Not only has the mansion ceased to exist, but the garden has been almost entirely changed. The wall of the Hôtel Gibbon occupies the site of the famous wooden pavilion, or summer-house, and of the "berceau of plum trees, which formed a verdant gallery completely arched overhead," and which "were called after Gibbon, La Gibbonière."--_Historic Studies_, i. I; ii. 493.
In 1816 the pavilion was "utterly decayed," and the garden neglected, but Byron gathered "a sprig of _Gibbon's acacia_," and some rose leaves from his garden and enclosed them in a letter to Murray (June 27, 1816). Shelley, on the contrary, "refrained from doing so, fearing to outrage the greater and more sacred name of Rousseau; the contemplation of whose imperishable creations had left no vacancy in my heart for mortal things. Gibbon had a cold and unimpassioned spirit."--_Essays, etc._, 1840, ii. 76.]
23.
Had I not filed my mind, which thus itself subdued. Stanza cxiii. line 9.
"----If't be so, For Banquo's issue have I _filed_ my mind." _Macbeth_, [act iii. sc. 1, line 64].
24.
O'er others' griefs that some sincerely grieve. Stanza cxiv. line 7.
It is said by Rochefoucault, that "there is _always_ something in the misfortunes of men's best friends not displeasing to them."
["Dans l'adversité de nos meilleurs amis, nous trouvons toujours quelque chose qui ne nous déplaît pas."--_Appendice aux Maximes de La Rochefoucauld, Panthéon Littéraire_, Paris, 1836, p. 460.]
FOOTNOTES:
[356] {303} [_Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse_: _Oeuvres Complètes de J. J. Rousseau_, Paris, 1837, ii. 262.]
[357] [The Clef, is now a café on the Grande Place, and still distinguished by the sign of the Key. But Vevey had other associations for Rousseau, more powerful and more persuasive than a solitary visit to an inn. "Madame Warens," says General Read, "possessed a charming country resort midway between Vevey and Chillon, just above the beautiful village of Clarens. It was situated at the Bassets, amid scenery whose exquisite features inspired some of the fine imagery of Rousseau. It is now called the Bassets de Pury. ... The exterior of the older parts has not been changed. ... The stairway leads to a large _salon_, whose windows command a view of Meillerie, St. Gingolph, and Bouveret, beyond the lake. Communicating with this _salon_ is a large dining-room.
"These two rooms open to the east, upon a broad terrace. At a corner of the terrace is a large summer-house, and through the chestnut trees one sees as far as Les Crêtes, the hillocks and bosquets described by Rousseau. Near by is a dove-cote filled with cooing doves.... In the last century this site (Les Crêtes) was covered with pleasure-gardens, and some parts are even pointed out as associated with Rousseau and Madame de Warens."--_Historic Sketches of Vaud, etc._, by General Meredith Read, 1897, i. 433-437. There was, therefore, some excuse for the guide (see Byron's _Diary_, September 18, 1816) "confounding Rousseau with St. Preux, and mixing the man with the book."]
[358] {304} [Claire, afterwards Madame Orbe, is Julie's cousin and confidante. She is represented as whimsical and humorous. It is not impossible that "Claire," in _La Nouvelle Héloïse_, "bequeathed her name" to Claire, otherwise Jane Clairmont.]
[359] [Byron and Shelley sailed round the Lake of Geneva towards the end of June, 1816. Writing to Murray, June 27, he says, "I have traversed all Rousseau's ground with the _Héloïse_ before me;" and in the same letter announces the completion of a third canto of _Childe Harold_. He revisited Clarens and Chillon in company with Hobhouse in the following September (see extracts from a Journal, September 18, 1816, _Life_, pp. 311, 312).]
[360] [Bouveret, St. Gingolph, Evian.]
[361] {305} [Byron mentions the "squall off Meillerie" in a letter to Murray, dated Ouchy, near Lausanne, June 27, 1816. Compare, too, Shelley's version of the incident: "The wind gradually increased in violence until it blew tremendously; and as it came from the remotest extremity of the lake, produced waves of a frightful height, and covered the whole surface with a chaos of foam.... I felt in this near prospect of death a mixture of sensations, among which terror entered, though but subordinately. My feelings would have been less painful had I been alone; but I know that my companion would have attempted to save me, and I was overcome with humiliation, when I thought that his life might have been risked to preserve mine."--_Letters from Abroad_, etc.; _Essays_, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Mrs. Shelley, 1840, ii. 68, 69.]
[362] [Byron and Shelley slept at Clarens, June 26, 1816. The windows of their inn commanded a view of the _Bosquet de Julie_. "In the evening we walked thither. It is, indeed, Julia's wood ... the trees themselves were aged but vigorous.... We went again (June 27) to the _Bosquet de Julie_, and found that the precise spot was now utterly obliterated, and a heap of stones marked the place where the little chapel had once stood. Whilst we were execrating the author of this brutal folly, our guide informed us that the land belonged to the Convent of St. Bernard, and that this outrage had been committed by their orders. I knew before that if avarice could harden the hearts of men, a system of prescriptive religion has an influence far more inimical to natural sensibility. I know that an isolated man is sometimes restrained by shame from outraging the venerable feelings arising out of the memory of genius, which once made nature even lovelier than itself; but associated man holds it as the very sacrament of this union to forswear all delicacy, all benevolence, all remorse; all that is true, or tender, or sublime."--_Essays, etc._, 1840, ii. 75.]
* * * * *
CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE.
CANTO THE FOURTH.
"Visto ho Toscana Lombardia Romagna, Quel monte che divide, e quel che serra Italia, e un mare e l'altro che la bagna."
_Ariosto_, Satira iv. lines 58-60.
* * * * *
INTRODUCTION TO THE FOURTH CANTO.
The first draft of the Fourth Canto of _Childe Harold_, which embodies the original and normal conception of the poem, was the work of twenty-six days. On the 17th of June, 1817, Byron wrote to Murray: "You are out about the Third Canto: I have not done, nor designed, a line of continuation to that poem. I was too short a time at Rome for it, and have no thought of recommencing." But in spite of this assertion, "the numbers came," and on June 26 he made a beginning. Thirty stanzas "were roughened off" on the 1st of July, fifty-six were accomplished by the 9th, "ninety and eight" by the 13th, and on July 20 he announces "the completion of the fourth and ultimate canto of _Childe Harold_. It consists of 126 stanzas." One stanza (xl.) was appended to the fair copy. It suggested a parallel between Ariosto "the Southern Scott," and Scott "the Northern Ariosto," and excited some misgiving.
In commending his new poem to Murray (July 20, August 7), Byron notes three points in which it differed from its predecessors: it is "the longest of the four;" "it treats more of works of art than of nature;" "there are no metaphysics in it--at least, I think not." In other words, "The Fourth Canto is not a continuation of the Third. I have parted company with Shelley and Wordsworth. Subject-matter and treatment are alike new."
The poem as it stood was complete, and, as a poem, it lost as well as gained by the insertion of additional stanzas and groups of stanzas, "purple patch" on "purple patch," each by itself so attractive and so splendid. The pilgrim finds himself at Venice, on the "Bridge of Sighs." He beholds in a vision the departed glories of "a thousand years." The "long array of shadows," the "beings of the mind," come to him "like truth," and repeople the vacancy. But he is an exile, and turns homeward in thought to "the inviolate island of the sage and free." He is an exile and a sufferer. He can and will endure his fate, but "ever and anon" he feels the prick of woe, and with the sympathy of despair would stand "a ruin amidst ruins," a desolate soul in a land of desolation and decay. He renews his pilgrimage. He passes Arquà, where "they keep the dust of Laura's lover," lingers for a day at Ferrara, haunted by memories of "Torquato's injured shade," and, as he approaches "the fair white walls" of Florence, he re-echoes the "Italia! oh, Italia!" of Filicaja's impassioned strains. At Florence he gazes, "dazzled and drunk with beauty," at the "goddess in stone," the Medicean Venus, but forbears to "describe the indescribable," to break the silence of Art by naming its mysteries. Santa Croce and the other glories "in Arno's dome of Art's most princely shrine," he passes by unsung, if not unseen; but Thrasymene's "sheet of silver," the "living crystal" of Clitumnus' "gentlest waters," and Terni's "matchless cataract," on whose verge "an Iris sits," and "lone Soracte's ridge," not only call forth his spirit's homage, but receive the homage of his Muse.
And now the Pilgrim has reached his goal, "Rome the wonderful," the sepulchre of empire, the shrine of art.
Henceforth the works of man absorb his attention. Pompey's "dread statue;" the Wolf of the Capitol; the Tomb of Cecilia Metella; the Palatine; the "nameless column" of the Forum; Trajan's pillar; Egeria's Grotto; the ruined Colosseum, "arches on arches," an "enormous skeleton," the Colosseum of the poet's vision, a multitudinous ring of spectators, a bloody Circus, and a dying Gladiator; the Pantheon; S. Nicola in Carcere, the scene of the Romana Caritas; St. Peter's "vast and wondrous dome,"--are all celebrated in due succession. Last of all, he "turns to the Vatican," to view the Laocoon and the Apollo Belvidere, the counterfeit presentments of ideal suffering and ideal beauty. His "shrine is won;" but ere he bids us farewell he climbs the Alban Mount, and as the Mediterranean once more bursts upon his sight, he sums the moral of his argument. Man and all his works are as a drop of rain in the Ocean, "the image of eternity, the throne of the Invisible"!
Byron had no sooner completed "this fourth and ultimate canto," than he began to throw off additional stanzas. His letters to Murray during the autumn of 1817 announce these successive lengthenings; but it is impossible to trace the exact order of their composition. On the 7th of August the canto stood at 130 stanzas, on the 21st at 133; on the 4th of September at 144, on the 17th at 150; and by November 15 it had reached 167 stanzas. Of nineteen stanzas which were still to be added, six--on the death of the Princess Charlotte (died November 6, 1817)--were written at the beginning of December, and two stanzas (clxxvii., clxxviii.) were forwarded to Murray in the early spring of 1818.
Of these additions the most notable are four stanzas on Venice (including stanza xiii. on "The Horses of St. Mark"); "The sunset on the Brenta" (stanzas xxvii.-xxix.); The tombs in Santa Croce,--the apostrophe to "the all Etruscan three," Petrarch, Dante, Boccaccio (stanzas liv.-lx.); "Rome a chaos of ruins--antiquarian ignorance" (stanzas lxxx.-lxxxii.); "The nothingness of Man--the hope of the future--Freedom" (stanzas xciii.-xcviii.); "The Tarpeian Rock--the Forum--Rienzi" (stanzas cxii.-cxiv.); "Love, Life, and Reason" (stanzas cxx.-cxxvii.); "The Curse of Forgiveness" (stanzas cxxxv.-cxxxvii.); "The Mole of Hadrian" (stanza clii.); "The death of the Princess Charlotte" (stanzas clxvii.-clxxii.); "Nemi" (stanzas clxxiii., clxxiv.); "The Desert and one fair Spirit" (stanzas clxxvii., clxxviii.).
Some time during the month of December, 1817, Byron wrote out a fair copy of the entire canto, numbering 184 stanzas _(MS. D.)_; and on January 7, 1818, Hobhouse left Venice for England, with the "whole of the MSS.," viz. _Beppo_ (begun October, 1817), and the Fourth Canto of _Childe Harold_, together with a work of his own, a volume of essays on Italian literature, the antiquities of Rome, etc., which he had put together during his residence in Venice (July--December, 1817), and proposed to publish as an appendix to _Childe Harold_. In his preface to _Historical Illustrations_, etc., 1818, Hobhouse explains that on his return to England he considered that this "appendix to the Canto would be swelled to a disproportioned bulk," and that, under this impression, he determined to divide his material into two parts. The result was that "such only of the notes as were more immediately connected with the text" were printed as "Historical Notes to Canto the Fourth," and that his longer dissertations were published in a separate volume, under his own name, as _Historical Illustrations to the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold_. To these "Historical Notes" an interest attaches apart from any consideration of their own worth and importance; but to understand the relation between the poem and the notes, it is necessary to retrace the movements of the poet and his annotator.
Byron and Hobhouse left the Villa Diodati, October 5, 1816, crossed the Simplon, and made their way together, via Milan and Verona, to Venice. Early in December the friends parted company. Byron remained at Venice, and Hobhouse proceeded to Rome, and for the next four months devoted himself to the study of Italian literature, in connection with archæology and art. Byron testifies (September 14, 1817) that his researches were "indefatigable," that he had "more real knowledge of Rome and its environs than any Englishman who has been there since Gibbon." Hobhouse left Rome for Naples, May 21; returned to Rome, June 9; arrived at Terni, July 2; and early in July joined Byron on the Brenta, at La Mira. The latter half of the year (July--December, 1817) was occupied in consulting "the best authorities" in the Ducal Library at Venice, with a view to perfecting his researches, and giving them to the world as an illustrative appendix to _Childe Harold_. It is certain that Byron had begun the fourth canto, and written some thirty or more stanzas, before Hobhouse rejoined him at his villa of La Mira on the banks of the Brenta, in July, 1817; and it would seem that, although he had begun by saying "that he was too short a time in Rome for it," he speedily overcame his misgivings, and accomplished, as he believed, the last "fytte" of his pilgrimage. The first draft was Byron's unaided composition, but the "additional stanzas" were largely due to Hobhouse's suggestions in the course of conversation, if not to his written "researches." Hobhouse himself made no secret of it. In his preface (p. 5) to _Historical Illustrations_ he affirms that both "illustrations" and notes were "for the most part written while the noble author was yet employed in the composition of the poem. They were put into the hands of Lord Byron much in the state in which they now appear;" and, writing to Murray, December 7, 1817, he says, "I must confess I feel an affection for it [Canto IV.] more than ordinary, as part of it was begot as it were under my own eyes; for although your poets are as shy as elephants and camels ... yet I have, not unfrequently, witnessed his lordship's coupleting, and some of the stanzas owe their birth to our morning walk or evening ride at La Mira." Forty years later, in his revised and enlarged "Illustrations" (_Italy: Remarks made in Several Visits from the year 1816 to 1854_, by the Right Hon. Lord Broughton, G.C.B., 1859, i. p. iv.), he reverts to this collaboration: "When I rejoined Lord Byron at La Mira ... I found him employed upon the Fourth Canto of _Childe Harold_, and, later in the autumn, he showed me the first sketch of the poem. It was much shorter than it afterwards became, and it did not remark on several objects which appeared to me peculiarly worthy of notice. I made a list of these objects, and in conversation with him gave him reasons for the selection. The result was the poem as it now appears, and he then engaged me to write the notes."
As the "delicate spirit" of Shelley suffused the third canto of _Childe Harold_, so the fourth reveals the presence and co-operation of Hobhouse. To his brother-poet he owed a fresh conception, perhaps a fresh appreciation of nature; to his lifelong friend, a fresh enthusiasm for art, and a host of details, "dry bones ... which he awakened into the fulness of life."
The Fourth Canto was published on Tuesday, April 28, 1818. It was reviewed by [Sir] Walter Scott in the _Quarterly Review_, No. xxxvii., April, 1818, and by John Wilson in the _Edinburgh Review_, No. 59, June, 1818. Both numbers were published on the same day, September 26, 1818.
CHILDE HAROLD, CANTO IV. ORIGINAL DRAFT. [MS. M.]
[June 26--July 19. 1817.]
Stanza i. "I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs,"--
Stanza iii.-xi. "In Venice Tasso's echoes are no more,"--"The spouseless Adriatic mourns her Lord,"--
Stanza xv. "Statues of glass--all shivered--the long file,"--
Stanza xviii.-xxvi. "I loved her from my boyhood--she to me,"--"The Commonwealth of Kings--the Men of Rome!"--
Stanza xxx.-xxxix. "There is a tomb in Arqua;--reared in air,"--"Peace to Torquato's injured shade! 'twas his,"--
Stanza xlii.-xlvi. "Italia! oh, Italia! thou who hast,"--"That page is now before me, and on mine,"--
Stanza xlviii.-l. "But Arno wins us to the fair white walls,"--"We gaze and turn away, and know not where,"--
Stanza liii. "I leave to learnéd fingers, and wise hands,"--
Stanza lxi.-lxxix. "There be more things to greet the heart and eyes,"--"The Niobe of nations! there she stands,"--
Stanza lxxxiii. "Oh, thou, whose chariot rolled on Fortune's wheel,"--
Stanza lxxxiv. "The dictatorial wreath--couldst thou divine,"--
Stanza lxxxvii.-xcii. "And thou, dread Statue! yet existent in,"--"And would be all or nothing--nor could wait,"--
Stanza xcix.-cviii. "There is a stern round tower of other days,"--"There is the moral of all human tales,"--
Stanza cx. "Tully was not so eloquent as thou,"--
Stanza cxi. "Buried in air, the deep blue sky of Rome,"--
Stanza cxv.-cxix. "Egeria! sweet creation of some heart,"--"And didst thou not, thy breast to his replying,"--
Stanza cxxviii.-cxxxiv. "Arches on arches! as it were that Rome,"--"And if my voice break forth, 'tis not that now,"--
Stanza cxxxviii.-cli. "The seal is set.--Now welcome, thou dread Power!"--"The starry fable of the Milky Way,"--
Stanza cliii.-clxvi. "But lo! the Dome--the vast and wondrous Dome,"--"And send us prying into the abyss,"--
Stanza clxxv. "But I forget.--My Pilgrim's shrine is won,"--
Stanza clxxvi. "Upon the blue Symplegades: long years,"--
Stanza clxxix. "Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean--roll!"--
Stanza clxxx. "His steps are not upon thy paths,--thy fields,"--
Stanza clxxxiii.-clxxxvi. "Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form,"--"Farewell! a word that must be, and hath been,"--
ADDITIONAL STANZA.
Stanza xl. "Great as thou art, yet paralleled by those,"--
(127 stanzas.)
ADDITIONS BOUND UP WITH MS. M.
Stanza ii. "She looks a sea Cybele, fresh from Ocean,"--
Stanza xii.-xiv. "The Suabian sued, and now the Austrian reigns," --(November 10, 1817.)--"In youth She was all glory,--a new Tyre,"--
Stanza xvi. "When Athens' armies fell at Syracuse,"--
Stanza xvii. "Thus, Venice! if no stronger claim were thine,"--
Stanza xxvii.-xxix. "The Moon is up, and yet it is not night,"--"Filled with the face of heaven, which, from afar,"--
Stanza xlvii. "Yet, Italy! through every other land,"--
Stanza li. "Appear'dst thou not to Paris in this guise?"--
Stanza lii. "Glowing, and circumfused in speechless love,"--
Stanza liv.-lx. "In Santa Croce's holy precincts lie,"--"What is her Pyramid of precious stones?"--
Stanza lxxx.-lxxxii. "The Goth, the Christian--Time--War--Flood, and Fire,"--"Alas! the lofty city! and alas!"--
Stanza lxxxv. "Sylla was first of victors; but our own,"--
Stanza lxxxvi. "The third of the same Moon whose former course,"--
Stanza xciii.-xcvi. "What from this barren being do we reap?"--"Can tyrants but by tyrants conquered be,"--
Stanza cix. "Admire--exult--despise--laugh--weep,--for here,"--
Stanza cxii.-cxiv. "Where is the rock of Triumph, the high place,"--"Then turn we to her latest Tribune's name,"--
Stanza cxxiii. "Who loves, raves--'tis youth's frenzy--but the cure,"--
Stanza cxxv.-cxxvii. "Few--none--find what they love or could have loved,"--"Yet let us ponder boldly--'tis a base,"--
Stanza cxxxv.-cxxxvii. "That curse shall be Forgiveness,--Have I not,"--"But I have lived, and have not lived in vain,"--
Stanza clii. "Turn to the Mole which Hadrian reared on high,"--
Stanza clxvii.-clxxii. "Hark! forth from the abyss a voice proceeds,"--(On the death of the Princess Charlotte, November 6, 1817.)--"These might have been her destiny--but no,"--
Stanza clxxiii. "Lo, Nemi! navelled in the woody hills,"--
Stanza clxxiv. "And near, Albano's scarce divided waves,"--
Stanza clxxvii. "Oh! that the Desert were my dwelling-place,"--(1818.)
Stanza clxxviii. "There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,"--(1818.)
Stanza clxxxi. "The armaments which thunderstrike the walls,"--
Stanza clxxxii. "Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee,"--
(52 stanzas.)
ADDITIONS INCLUDED IN MS. D.,[363] BUT NOT AMONG MSS. M.
Stanza xli. "The lightning rent from Ariosto's bust,"--
Stanza xcvii. "But France got drunk with blood to vomit crime,"--
Stanza xcviii. "Yet, Freedom! yet thy banner, torn, but flying,"--
Stanza cxx. "Alas! our young affections run to waste,"--
Stanza cxxi. "Oh, Love! no habitant of earth thou art,"--
Stanza cxxii. "Of its own beauty is the mind diseased,"--
Stanza cxxiv. "We wither from our youth, we gasp away,"--
(Seven stanzas.)
* * * * *
TO
JOHN HOBHOUSE, ESQ., A.M., F.R.S.,
&c., &c., &c. Venice, _January_ 2, 1818.
* * * * *
My dear Hobhouse,
After an interval of eight years between the composition of the first and last cantos of _Childe Harold_, the conclusion of the poem is about to be submitted to the public. In parting with so old a friend,[364] it is not extraordinary that I should recur to one still older and better,--to one who has beheld the birth and death of the other, and to whom I am far more indebted for the social advantages of an enlightened friendship, than--though not ungrateful--I can, or could be, to _Childe Harold_, for any public favour reflected through the poem on the poet,--to one, whom I have known long, and accompanied far, whom I have found wakeful over my sickness and kind in my sorrow, glad in my prosperity and firm in my adversity, true in counsel and trusty in peril,--to a friend often tried and never found wanting;--to yourself.
In so doing, I recur from fiction to truth; and in dedicating to you in its complete, or at least concluded state, a poetical work which is the longest, the most thoughtful and comprehensive of my compositions, I wish to do honour to myself by the record of many years' intimacy with a man of learning, of talent, of steadiness, and of honour. It is not for minds like ours to give or to receive flattery; yet the praises of sincerity have ever been permitted to the voice of friendship; and it is not for you, nor even for others, but to relieve a heart which has not elsewhere, or lately, been so much accustomed to the encounter of good-will as to withstand the shock firmly, that I thus attempt to commemorate your good qualities, or rather the advantages which I have derived from their exertion. Even the recurrence of the date of this letter, the anniversary of the most unfortunate day of my past existence,[365] but which cannot poison my future while I retain the resource of your friendship, and of my own faculties, will henceforth have a more agreeable recollection for both, inasmuch as it will remind us of this my attempt to thank you for an indefatigable regard, such as few men have experienced, and no one could experience without thinking better of his species and of himself.
It has been our fortune to traverse together, at various periods, the countries of chivalry, history, and fable--Spain, Greece, Asia Minor, and Italy; and what Athens and Constantinople were to us a few years ago, Venice and Rome have been more recently. The poem also, or the pilgrim, or both, have accompanied me from first to last; and perhaps it may be a pardonable vanity which induces me to reflect with complacency on a composition which in some degree connects me with the spot where it was produced, and the objects it would fain describe; and however unworthy it may be deemed of those magical and memorable abodes, however short it may fall of our distant conceptions and immediate impressions, yet as a mark of respect for what is venerable, and of feeling for what is glorious, it has been to me a source of pleasure in the production, and I part with it with a kind of regret, which I hardly suspected that events could have left me for imaginary objects.
With regard to the conduct of the last canto, there will be found less of the pilgrim than in any of the preceding, and that little slightly, if at all, separated from the author speaking in his own person. The fact is, that I had become weary of drawing a line which every one seemed determined not to perceive: like the Chinese in Goldsmith's _Citizen of the World_,[366] whom nobody would believe to be a Chinese, it was in vain that I asserted, and imagined that I had drawn, a distinction between the author and the pilgrim; and the very anxiety to preserve this difference, and disappointment at finding it unavailing, so far crushed my efforts in the composition, that I determined to abandon it altogether--and have done so. The opinions which have been, or may be, formed on that subject are _now_ a matter of indifference: the work is to depend on itself, and not on the writer; and the author, who has no resources in his own mind beyond the reputation, transient or permanent, which is to arise from his literary efforts, deserves the fate of authors.
In the course of the following canto it was my intention, either in the text or in the notes, to have touched upon the present state of Italian literature, and perhaps of manners. But the text, within the limits I proposed, I soon found hardly sufficient for the labyrinth of external objects, and the consequent reflections: and for the whole of the notes, excepting a few of the shortest, I am indebted to yourself,[367] and these were necessarily limited to the elucidation of the text.
It is also a delicate, and no very grateful task, to dissert upon the literature and manners of a nation so dissimilar; and requires an attention and impartiality which would induce us,--though perhaps no inattentive observers, nor ignorant of the language or customs of the people amongst whom we have recently abode--to distrust, or at least defer our judgment, and more narrowly examine our information. The state of literary, as well as political party, appears to run, or to _have_ run, so high, that for a stranger to steer impartially between them is next to impossible. It may be enough, then, at least for my purpose, to quote from their own beautiful language--"Mi pare che in un paese tutto poetico, che vanta la lingua la più nobile ed insieme la più dolce, tutte tutte le vie diverse si possono tentare, e che sinche la patria di Alfieri e di Monti non ha perduto l'antico valore, in tutte essa dovrebbe essere la prima." Italy has great names still--Canova,[368] Monti, Ugo Foscolo, Pindemonte, Visconti, Morelli, Cicognara, Albrizzi, Mezzofanti, Mai, Mustoxidi, Aglietti, and Vacca, will secure to the present generation an honourable place in most of the departments of Art, Science, and Belles Lettres; and in some the very highest--Europe--the World--has but one Canova.
It has been somewhere said by Alfieri, that "La pianta uomo nasce più robusta in Italia che in qualunque altra terra--e che gli stessi atroci delitti che vi si commettono ne sono una prova." Without subscribing to the latter part of his proposition, a dangerous doctrine, the truth of which may be disputed on better grounds, namely, that the Italians are in no respect more ferocious than their neighbours, that man must be wilfully blind, or ignorantly heedless, who is not struck with the extraordinary capacity of this people, or, if such a word be admissible, their _capabilities_,[369] the facility of their acquisitions, the rapidity of their conceptions, the fire of their genius, their sense of beauty, and, amidst all the disadvantages of repeated revolutions, the desolation of battles, and the despair of ages, their still unquenched "longing after immortality,"[370]--the immortality of independence. And when we ourselves, in riding round the walls of Rome, heard the simple lament of the labourers' chorus, "Roma! Roma! Roma! Roma non è più come era prima!"[371] it was difficult not to contrast this melancholy dirge with the bacchanal roar of the songs of exultation still yelled from the London taverns, over the carnage of Mont St. Jean,[372] and the betrayal of Genoa, of Italy, of France, and of the world, by men whose conduct you yourself have exposed in a work worthy of the better days of our history.[373] For me,--
"Non movero mai corda Ove la turba di sue ciance assorda."
What Italy has gained by the late transfer of nations, it were useless for Englishmen to enquire, till it becomes ascertained that England has acquired something more than a permanent army and a suspended Habeas Corpus;[374] it is enough for them to look at home. For what they have done abroad, and especially in the South, "Verily they _will have_ their reward," and at no very distant period.
Wishing you, my dear Hobhouse, a safe and agreeable return to that country whose real welfare can be dearer to none than to yourself, I dedicate to you this poem in its completed state; and repeat once more how truly I am ever
Your obliged And affectionate friend, BYRON.
CANTO THE FOURTH[375]
I.
I stood in Venice, on the "Bridge of Sighs;"[376][1.H.] A Palace and a prison on each hand: I saw from out the wave her structures rise As from the stroke of the Enchanter's wand:[377] A thousand Years their cloudy wings expand Around me, and a dying Glory smiles O'er the far times, when many a subject land Looked to the winged Lion's marble piles, Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles![lb]
II.
She looks a sea Cybele,[378] fresh from Ocean, Rising with her tiara of proud towers At airy distance, with majestic motion, A Ruler of the waters and their powers: And such she was;--her daughters had their dowers From spoils of nations, and the exhaustless East[lc] Poured in her lap all gems in sparkling showers.[379] In purple was she robed,[380] and of her feast Monarchs partook, and deemed their dignity increased.[ld]
III.
In Venice Tasso's echoes are no more,[2.H.] And silent rows the songless Gondolier;[381] Her palaces are crumbling to the shore, And Music meets not always now the ear: Those days are gone--but Beauty still is here. States fall--Arts fade--but Nature doth not die, Nor yet forget how Venice once was dear, The pleasant place of all festivity,[le] The Revel of the earth--the Masque of Italy!
IV.
But unto us she hath a spell beyond Her name in story, and her long array Of mighty shadows, whose dim forms despond Above the Dogeless city's vanished sway; Ours is a trophy which will not decay With the Rialto;[382] Shylock and the Moor, And Pierre,[383] can not be swept or worn away-- The keystones of the Arch! though all were o'er, For us repeopled were the solitary shore.
V.
The Beings of the Mind are not of clay: Essentially immortal, they create And multiply in us a brighter ray And more beloved existence:[384] that which Fate Prohibits to dull life in this our state[lf] Of mortal bondage, by these Spirits supplied, First exiles, then replaces what we hate; Watering the heart whose early flowers have died, And with a fresher growth replenishing the void.
VI.
Such is the refuge of our youth and age-- The first from Hope, the last from Vacancy;[385] And this wan feeling peoples many a page--[lg] And, may be, that which grows beneath mine eye:[lh] Yet there are things whose strong reality Outshines our fairy-land; in shape and hues[li] More beautiful than our fantastic sky, And the strange constellations which the Muse O'er her wild universe is skilful to diffuse:
VII.
I saw or dreamed of such,--but let them go,-- They came like Truth--and disappeared like dreams; And whatsoe'er they were--are now but so: I could replace them if I would; still teems My mind with many a form which aptly seems Such as I sought for, and at moments found; Let these too go--for waking Reason deems Such over-weening phantasies unsound, And other voices speak, and other sights surround.
VIII.
I've taught me other tongues--and in strange eyes Have made me not a stranger; to the mind Which is itself, no changes bring surprise; Nor is it harsh to make, nor hard to find A country with--aye, or without mankind; Yet was I born where men are proud to be,-- Not without cause; and should I leave behind[lj] The inviolate Island of the sage and free, And seek me out a home by a remoter sea,[lk]
IX.
Perhaps I loved it well; and should I lay My ashes in a soil which is not mine, My Spirit shall resume it--if we may[ll] Unbodied choose a sanctuary.[386] I twine My hopes of being remembered in my line With my land's language: if too fond and far These aspirations in their scope incline,-- If my Fame should be, as my fortunes are, Of hasty growth and blight, and dull Oblivion bar
X.
My name from out the temple where the dead Are honoured by the Nations--let it be-- And light the Laurels on a loftier head! And be the Spartan's epitaph on me-- "Sparta hath many a worthier son than he."[387] Meantime I seek no sympathies, nor need-- The thorns which I have reaped are of the tree I planted,--they have torn me,--and I bleed: I should have known what fruit would spring from such a seed.
XI.
The spouseless Adriatic mourns her Lord,[lm] And annual marriage now no more renewed-- The Bucentaur[388] lies rotting unrestored, Neglected garment of her widowhood! St. Mark yet sees his Lion[389] where he stood[3.H.] Stand, but in mockery of his withered power, Over the proud Place where an Emperor sued,[ln][390] And monarchs gazed and envied in the hour When Venice was a Queen with an unequalled dower.
XII.
The Suabian sued, and now the Austrian reigns--[4.H.] An Emperor tramples where an Emperor knelt; Kingdoms are shrunk to provinces, and chains Clank over sceptred cities; Nations melt From Power's high pinnacle, when they have felt The sunshine for a while, and downward go Like Lauwine loosened from the mountain's belt; Oh for one hour of blind old Dandolo![391][5.H.] Th' octogenarian chief, Byzantium's conquering foe.[lo][392]
XIII.
Before St. Mark still glow his Steeds of brass, Their gilded collars glittering in the sun; But is not Doria's menace[393] come to pass?[6.H.] Are they not bridled?--Venice, lost and won, Her thirteen hundred years of freedom done, Sinks, like a sea-weed, unto whence she rose![lp][394] Better be whelmed beneath the waves, and shun, Even in Destruction's depth, her foreign foes,[lq] From whom Submission wrings an infamous repose.
XIV.
In youth She was all glory,--a new Tyre,-- Her very by-word sprung from Victory, The "Planter of the Lion,"[395] which through fire And blood she bore o'er subject Earth and Sea; Though making many slaves, Herself still free, And Europe's bulwark 'gainst the Ottomite;[396] Witness Troy's rival, Candia![397] Vouch it, ye Immortal waves that saw Lepanto's fight![398] For ye are names no Time nor Tyranny can blight.
XV.
Statues of glass--all shivered--the long file Of her dead Doges are declined to dust; But where they dwelt, the vast and sumptuous pile Bespeaks the pageant of their splendid trust; Their sceptre broken, and their sword in rust, Have yielded to the stranger: empty halls, Thin streets, and foreign aspects, such as must Too oft remind her who and what enthrals,[7.H.] Have flung a desolate cloud o'er Venice' lovely walls.
XVI.
When Athens' armies fell at Syracuse, And fettered thousands bore the yoke of war, Redemption rose up in the Attic Muse,[399] Her voice their only ransom from afar:[lr] See! as they chant the tragic hymn, the car Of the o'ermastered Victor stops--the reins Fall from his hands--his idle scimitar Starts from its belt--he rends his captive's chains, And bids him thank the Bard for Freedom and his strains.[ls]
XVII.
Thus, Venice! if no stronger claim were thine, Were all thy proud historic deeds forgot-- Thy choral memory of the Bard divine, Thy love of Tasso, should have cut the knot[lt] Which ties thee to thy tyrants; and thy lot Is shameful to the nations,--most of all, Albion! to thee:[400] the Ocean queen should not Abandon Ocean's children; in the fall Of Venice think of thine, despite thy watery wall.[lu]
XVIII.
I loved her from my boyhood--she to me Was as a fairy city of the heart, Rising like water-columns from the sea-- Of Joy the sojourn, and of Wealth the mart; And Otway, Radcliffe, Schiller, Shakespeare's art,[lv][401] Had stamped her image in me, and even so, Although I found her thus, we did not part;[lw] Perchance even dearer in her day of woe, Than when she was a boast, a marvel, and a show.
XIX.
I can repeople with the past--and of The present there is still for eye and thought, And meditation chastened down, enough; And more, it may be, than I hoped or sought; And of the happiest moments which were wrought Within the web of my existence, some From thee, fair Venice![402] have their colours caught: There are some feelings Time can not benumb,[lx] Nor Torture shake, or mine would now be cold and dumb.
XX.
But from their nature will the Tannen[403] grow[ly] Loftiest on loftiest and least sheltered rocks, Rooted in barrenness, where nought below Of soil supports them 'gainst the Alpine shocks Of eddying storms; yet springs the trunk, and mocks The howling tempest, till its height and frame Are worthy of the mountains from whose blocks Of bleak, gray granite into life it came,[lz] And grew a giant tree;--the Mind may grow the same.
XXI.
Existence may be borne, and the deep root Of life and sufferance make its firm abode In bare and desolated bosoms: mute[ma] The camel labours with the heaviest load, And the wolf dies in silence--not bestowed In vain should such example be; if they, Things of ignoble or of savage mood, Endure and shrink not, we of nobler clay May temper it to bear,--it is but for a day.
XXII.
All suffering doth destroy, or is destroyed,[404] Even by the sufferer--and, in each event, Ends:--Some, with hope replenished and rebuoyed, Return to whence they came--with like intent, And weave their web again; some, bowed and bent, Wax gray and ghastly, withering ere their time, And perish with the reed on which they leant; Some seek devotion--toil--war--good or crime, According as their souls were formed to sink or climb.
XXIII.
But ever and anon of griefs subdued There comes a token like a Scorpion's sting, Scarce seen, but with fresh bitterness imbued; And slight withal may be the things which bring Back on the heart the weight which it would fling Aside for ever: it may be a sound--[405] A tone of music--summer's eve--or spring--[mb] A flower--the wind--the Ocean--which shall wound, Striking the electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound;
XXIV.
And how and why we know not, nor can trace Home to its cloud this lightning of the mind, But feel the shock renewed, nor can efface The blight and blackening which it leaves behind, Which out of things familiar, undesigned, When least we deem of such, calls up to view The Spectres whom no exorcism can bind,-- The cold--the changed--perchance the dead, anew-- The mourned--the loved--the lost--too many! yet how few![406]
XXV.
But my Soul wanders; I demand it back To meditate amongst decay, and stand A ruin amidst ruins; there to track Fall'n states and buried greatness, o'er a land Which _was_ the mightiest in its old command, And _is_ the loveliest, and must ever be The master-mould of Nature's heavenly hand; Wherein were cast the heroic and the free,-- The beautiful--the brave--the Lords of earth and sea,
XXVI.
The Commonwealth of Kings--the Men of Rome! And even since, and now, fair Italy! Thou art the Garden of the World, the Home Of all Art yields, and Nature can decree; Even in thy desert, what is like to thee? Thy very weeds are beautiful--thy waste More rich than other climes' fertility; Thy wreck a glory--and thy ruin graced With an immaculate charm which cannot be defaced.
XXVII.
The Moon is up, and yet it is not night-- Sunset divides the sky with her--a sea Of glory streams along the Alpine height Of blue Friuli's mountains;[407] Heaven is free From clouds, but of all colours seems to be,-- Melted to one vast Iris of the West,-- Where the Day joins the past Eternity; While, on the other hand, meek Dian's crest Floats through the azure air--an island of the blest![408]
XXVIII.
A single star is at her side, and reigns With her o'er half the lovely heaven; but still Yon sunny Sea heaves brightly, and remains Rolled o'er the peak of the far Rhætian hill, As Day and Night contending were, until Nature reclaimed her order:--gently flows The deep-dyed Brenta,[409] where their hues instil The odorous purple of a new-born rose, Which streams upon her stream, and glassed within it glows,
XXIX.
Filled with the face of heaven, which, from afar, Comes down upon the waters! all its hues, From the rich sunset to the rising star, Their magical variety diffuse: And now they change--a paler Shadow strews Its mantle o'er the mountains; parting Day Dies like the Dolphin, whom each pang imbues With a new colour as it gasps away-- The last still loveliest, till--'tis gone--and all is gray.
XXX.
There is a tomb in Arqua;--reared in air, Pillared in their sarcophagus, repose The bones of Laura's lover: here repair Many familiar with his well-sung woes, The Pilgrims of his Genius. He arose To raise a language, and his land reclaim From the dull yoke of her barbaric foes: Watering the tree which bears his Lady's name[410][8.H.] With his melodious tears, he gave himself to Fame.
XXXI.
They keep his dust in Arqua,[411] where he died--[9.H.] The mountain-village where his latter days Went down the vale of years; and 'tis their pride-- An honest pride--and let it be their praise, To offer to the passing stranger's gaze His mansion and his sepulchre--both plain[mc] And venerably simple--such as raise A feeling more accordant with his strain Than if a Pyramid formed his monumental fane.[md]
XXXII.
And the soft quiet hamlet where he dwelt Is one of that complexion which seems made For those who their mortality[412] have felt, And sought a refuge from their hopes decayed In the deep umbrage of a green hill's shade, Which shows a distant prospect far away Of busy cities, now in vain displayed, For they can lure no further; and the ray[413] Of a bright Sun can make sufficient holiday,
XXXIII.
Developing the mountains, leaves, and flowers, And shining in the brawling brook, where-by, Clear as its current, glide the sauntering hours With a calm languor, which, though to the eye Idlesse it seem, hath its morality-- If from society we learn to live,[me] 'Tis Solitude should teach us how to die; It hath no flatterers--Vanity can give No hollow aid; alone--man with his God must strive:[mf]
XXXIV.
Or, it may be, with Demons,[414] who impair The strength of better thoughts, and seek their prey In melancholy bosoms--such as were Of moody texture from their earliest day, And loved to dwell in darkness and dismay Deeming themselves predestined to a doom Which is not of the pangs that pass away;[mg] Making the Sun like blood, the Earth a tomb, The tomb a hell--and Hell itself a murkier gloom.[mh]
XXXV.
Ferrara![415] in thy wide and grass-grown streets, Whose symmetry was not for solitude, There seems as 'twere a curse upon the Seats Of former Sovereigns, and the antique brood Of Este,[416] which for many an age made good Its strength within thy walls, and was of yore Patron or Tyrant, as the changing mood Of petty power impelled, of those who wore The wreath which Dante's brow alone had worn before.
XXXVI.
And Tasso is their glory and their shame-- Hark to his strain! and then survey his cell![417] And see how dearly earned Torquato's fame, And where Alfonso bade his poet dwell: The miserable Despot could not quell The insulted mind he sought to quench, and blend With the surrounding maniacs, in the hell Where he had plunged it. Glory without end Scattered the clouds away--and on that name attend
XXXVII.
The tears and praises of all time, while thine Would rot in its oblivion--in the sink Of worthless dust, which from thy boasted line Is shaken into nothing--but the link Thou formest in his fortunes bids us think Of thy poor malice, naming thee with scorn: Alfonso! how thy ducal pageants shrink From thee! if in another station born,[mi] Scarce fit to be the slave of him thou mad'st to mourn:
XXXVIII.
_Thou!_ formed to eat, and be despised, and die, Even as the beasts that perish--save that thou Hadst a more splendid trough and wider sty:-- _He!_ with a glory round his furrowed brow, Which emanated then, and dazzles now, In face of all his foes, the Cruscan quire,[418][10.H.] And Boileau, whose rash envy could allow[mj] No strain which shamed his country's creaking lyre, That whetstone of the teeth--Monotony in wire![mk][419]
XXXIX.
Peace to Torquato's injured shade! 'twas his In life and death to be the mark where Wrong Aimed with her poisoned arrows,--but to miss. Oh, Victor unsurpassed in modern song! Each year brings forth its millions--but how long The tide of Generations shall roll on, And not the whole combined and countless throng Compose a mind like thine? though all in one[ml] Condensed their scattered rays--they would not form a Sun.[mm]
XL.
Great as thou art, yet paralleled by those, Thy countrymen, before thee born to shine, The Bards of Hell and Chivalry: first rose The Tuscan Father's Comedy Divine; Then, not unequal to the Florentine, The southern Scott, the minstrel who called forth A new creation with his magic line, And, like the Ariosto of the North,[420] Sang Ladye-love and War, Romance and Knightly Worth.
XLI.
The lightning rent from Ariosto's bust[11.H.] The iron crown of laurel's mimicked leaves; Nor was the ominous element unjust, For the true laurel-wreath which Glory weaves[12.H.] Is of the tree no bolt of thunder cleaves, And the false semblance but disgraced his brow; Yet still, if fondly Superstition grieves, Know, that the lightning sanctifies below[13.H.] Whate'er it strikes;--yon head is doubly sacred now.
XLII.
Italia! oh, Italia! thou who hast[421] The fatal gift of Beauty, which became A funeral dower of present woes and past-- On thy sweet brow is sorrow ploughed by shame,[mn] And annals graved in characters of flame. Oh, God! that thou wert in thy nakedness Less lovely or more powerful, and couldst claim Thy right, and awe the robbers back, who press To shed thy blood, and drink the tears of thy distress;
XLIII.
Then might'st thou more appal--or, less desired, Be homely and be peaceful, undeplored[mo] For thy destructive charms; then, still untired, Would not be seen the arméd torrents poured Down the deep Alps; nor would the hostile horde Of many-nationed spoilers from the Po Quaff blood and water; nor the stranger's sword Be thy sad weapon of defence--and so, Victor or vanquished, thou the slave of friend or foe.
XLIV.
Wandering in youth, I traced the path of him, The Roman friend of Rome's least-mortal mind,[422] The friend of Tully: as my bark did skim The bright blue waters with a fanning wind, Came Megara before me, and behind Ægina lay--Piræus on the right, And Corinth on the left; I lay reclined Along the prow, and saw all these unite In ruin--even as he had seen the desolate sight;
XLV.
For Time hath not rebuilt them, but upreared Barbaric dwellings on their shattered site, Which only make more mourned and more endeared The few last rays of their far-scattered light, And the crashed relics of their vanished might. The Roman saw these tombs in his own age, These sepulchres of cities, which excite[mp] Sad wonder, and his yet surviving page The moral lesson bears, drawn from such pilgrimage.
XLVI.
That page is now before me, and on mine _His_ Country's ruin added to the mass Of perished states he mourned in their decline, And I in desolation: all that _was_ Of then destruction _is_; and now, alas! Rome--Rome imperial, bows her to the storm,[423] In the same dust and blackness, and we pass The skeleton of her Titanic form,[424] Wrecks of another world, whose ashes still are warm.
XLVII.
Yet, Italy! through every other land Thy wrongs should ring--and shall--from side to side;[425] Mother of Arts! as once of Arms! thy hand Was then our Guardian, and is still our Guide; Parent of our Religion! whom the wide Nations have knelt to for the keys of Heaven! Europe, repentant of her parricide, Shall yet redeem thee, and, all backward driven, Roll the barbarian tide, and sue to be forgiven.
XLVIII.
But Arno wins us to the fair white walls, Where the Etrurian Athens claims and keeps A softer feeling for her fairy halls: Girt by her theatre of hills, she reaps Her corn, and wine, and oil--and Plenty leaps To laughing life, with her redundant Horn. Along the banks where smiling Arno sweeps Was modern Luxury of Commerce born,[mq][426] And buried Learning rose, redeemed to a new Morn.
XLIX.
There, too, the Goddess loves in stone, and fills[mr][427][14.H.] The air around with Beauty--we inhale[ms] The ambrosial aspect, which, beheld, instils Part of its immortality--the veil Of heaven is half undrawn--within the pale We stand, and in that form and face behold What Mind can make, when Nature's self would fail; And to the fond Idolaters of old Envy the innate flash which such a Soul could mould:
L.
We gaze and turn away, and know not where, Dazzled and drunk with Beauty,[428] till the heart Reels with its fulness; there--for ever there-- Chained to the chariot of triumphal Art, We stand as captives, and would not depart. Away!--there need no words, nor terms precise, The paltry jargon of the marble mart, Where Pedantry gulls Folly--we have eyes: Blood--pulse--and breast confirm the Dardan Shepherd's prize.
LI.
Appear'dst thou not to Paris in this guise? Or to more deeply blest Anchises? or, In all thy perfect Goddess-ship, when lies Before thee thy own vanquished Lord of War? And gazing in thy face as toward a star, Laid on thy lap, his eyes to thee upturn, Feeding on thy sweet cheek![429] while thy lips are With lava kisses melting while they burn, Showered on his eyelids, brow, and mouth, as from an urn!
LII.
Glowing, and circumfused in speechless love--[mt][430] Their full divinity inadequate That feeling to express, or to improve-- The Gods become as mortals--and man's fate[mu] Has moments like their brightest; but the weight Of earth recoils upon us;--let it go! We can recall such visions, and create, From what has been, or might be, things which grow Into thy statue's form, and look like gods below.
LIII.
I leave to learnéd fingers, and wise hands, The Artist and his Ape, to teach and tell How well his Connoisseurship understands The graceful bend, and the voluptuous swell: Let these describe the undescribable: I would not their vile breath should crisp the stream Wherein that Image shall for ever dwell-- The unruffled mirror of the loveliest dream That ever left the sky on the deep soul to beam.
LIV.
In Santa Croce's[431] holy precincts lie[15.H.] Ashes which make it holier, dust which is Even in itself an immortality, Though there were nothing save the past, and this, The particle of those sublimities Which have relapsed to chaos:--here repose Angelo's--Alfieri's[432] bones--and his,[16.H.] The starry Galileo, with his woes; Here Machiavelli's earth returned to whence it rose.[17.H.]
LV.
These are four minds, which, like the elements, Might furnish forth creation:--Italy![mv] Time, which hath wronged thee with ten thousand rents Of thine imperial garment, shall deny[mw] And hath denied, to every other sky, Spirits which soar from ruin:--thy Decay Is still impregnate with divinity, Which gilds it with revivifying ray; Such as the great of yore, Canova[433] is to-day.
LVI.
But where repose the all Etruscan three-- Dante, and Petrarch, and, scarce less than they, The Bard of Prose, creative Spirit! he[mx] Of the Hundred Tales of Love--where did they lay Their bones, distinguished from our common clay In death as life? Are they resolved to dust, And have their Country's Marbles nought to say? Could not her quarries furnish forth one bust? Did they not to her breast their filial earth entrust?
LVII.
Ungrateful Florence! Dante sleeps afar,[434][18.H.] Like Scipio buried by the upbraiding shore:[435][19.H.] Thy factions, in their worse than civil war,[436] Proscribed the Bard whose name for evermore Their children's children would in vain adore With the remorse of ages; and the crown[437][20.H.] Which Petrarch's laureate brow supremely wore, Upon a far and foreign soil had grown, His Life, his Fame, his Grave, though rifled--not thine own.[438]
LVIII.
Boccaccio[439] to his parent earth bequeathed[my][21.H.] His dust,--and lies it not her Great among, With many a sweet and solemn requiem breathed O'er him who formed the Tuscan's siren tongue?[440] That music in itself, whose sounds are song, The poetry of speech? No;--even his tomb Uptorn, must bear the hyæna bigot's wrong, No more amidst the meaner dead find room, Nor claim a passing sigh, because it told for _whom!_
LIX.
And Santa Croce wants their mighty dust; Yet for this want more noted, as of yore The Cæsar's pageant,[441] shorn of Brutus' bust, Did but of Rome's best Son remind her more: Happier Ravenna! on thy hoary shore, Fortress of falling Empire! honoured sleeps[mz] The immortal Exile;--Arqua, too, her store Of tuneful relics proudly claims and keeps, While Florence vainly begs her banished dead and weeps.[442]
LX.
What is her Pyramid of precious stones?[22.H.] Of porphyry, jasper, agate, and all hues Of gem and marble, to encrust the bones Of merchant-dukes?[443] the momentary dews Which, sparkling to the twilight stars, infuse Freshness in the green turf that wraps the dead, Whose names are Mausoleums of the Muse, Are gently prest with far more reverent tread Than ever paced the slab which paves the princely head.
LXI.
There be more things to greet the heart and eyes In Arno's dome of Art's most princely shrine, Where Sculpture with her rainbow Sister vies;[444] There be more marvels yet--but not for mine; For I have been accustomed to entwine My thoughts with Nature rather in the fields, Than Art in galleries: though a work divine Calls for my Spirit's homage, yet it yields Less than it feels, because the weapon which it wields
LXII.
Is of another temper, and I roam By Thrasimene's lake,[445] in the defiles Fatal to Roman rashness, more at home; For there the Carthaginian's warlike wiles Come back before me, as his skill beguiles The host between the mountains and the shore, Where Courage falls in her despairing files,[na] And torrents, swoll'n to rivers with their gore, Reek through the sultry plain, with legions scattered o'er.
LXIII.
Like to a forest felled by mountain winds; And such the storm of battle on this day, And such the frenzy, whose convulsion blinds To all save Carnage, that, beneath the fray, An Earthquake[446] reeled unheededly away![23.H.] None felt stern Nature rocking at his feet, And yawning forth a grave for those who lay Upon their bucklers for a winding sheet-- Such is the absorbing hate when warring nations meet!
LXIV.
The Earth to them was as a rolling bark Which bore them to Eternity--they saw The Ocean round, but had no time to mark The motions of their vessel; Nature's law, In them suspended, recked not of the awe Which reigns when mountains tremble, and the birds Plunge in the clouds for refuge, and withdraw[nb] From their down-toppling nests; and bellowing herds Stumble o'er heaving plains--and Man's dread hath no words.
LXV.
Far other scene is Thrasimene now; Her lake a sheet of silver, and her plain Rent by no ravage save the gentle plough; Her agéd trees rise thick as once the slain Lay where their roots are; but a brook hath ta'en-- A little rill of scanty stream and bed-- A name of blood from that day's sanguine rain; And Sanguinetto tells ye where the dead Made the earth wet, and turned the unwilling waters red.[nc]
LXVI.
But thou, Clitumnus[447]! in thy sweetest wave Of the most living crystal that was e'er The haunt of river-Nymph, to gaze and lave Her limbs where nothing hid them, thou dost rear Thy grassy banks whereon the milk-white steer[448] Grazes--the purest God of gentle waters! And most serene of aspect, and most clear; Surely that stream was unprofaned by slaughters-- A mirror and a bath for Beauty's youngest daughters!
LXVII.
And on thy happy shore a Temple[449] still, Of small and delicate proportion, keeps Upon a mild declivity of hill,[nd] Its memory of thee; beneath it sweeps Thy current's calmness; oft from out it leaps The finny darter with the glittering scales,[450] Who dwells and revels in thy glassy deeps; While, chance, some scattered water-lily sails[ne] Down where the shallower wave still tells its bubbling tales.
LXVIII.
Pass not unblest the Genius of the place! If through the air a Zephyr more serene Win to the brow, 'tis his; and if ye trace Along his margin a more eloquent green, If on the heart the freshness of the scene Sprinkle its coolness, and from the dry dust Of weary life a moment lave it clean With Nature's baptism,--'tis to him ye must Pay orisons for this suspension of disgust.[451]
LXIX.
The roar of waters!--from the headlong height Velino cleaves the wave-worn precipice; The fall of waters! rapid as the light The flashing mass foams shaking the abyss; The Hell of Waters! where they howl and hiss, And boil in endless torture; while the sweat Of their great agony, wrung out from this Their Phlegethon, curls round the rocks of jet That gird the gulf around, in pitiless horror set,
LXX.
And mounts in spray the skies, and thence again Returns in an unceasing shower, which round, With its unemptied cloud of gentle rain, Is an eternal April to the ground, Making it all one emerald:--how profound[nf] The gulf! and how the Giant Element From rock to rock leaps with delirious bound,[ng] Crushing the cliffs, which, downward worn and rent With his fierce footsteps, yield in chasms a fearful vent
LXXI.
To the broad column which rolls on, and shows More like the fountain of an infant sea Torn from the womb of mountains by the throes Of a new world, than only thus to be Parent of rivers, which flow gushingly, With many windings, through the vale:--Look back! Lo! where it comes like an Eternity, As if to sweep down all things in its track, Charming the eye with dread,--a matchless cataract,[452]
LXXII.
Horribly beautiful! but on the verge, From side to side, beneath the glittering morn, An Iris[453] sits, amidst the infernal surge, Like Hope upon a death-bed, and, unworn Its steady dyes, while all around is torn By the distracted waters, bears serene Its brilliant hues with all their beams unshorn: Resembling, 'mid the torture of the scene, Love watching Madness with unalterable mien.
LXXIII.
Once more upon the woody Apennine-- The infant Alps, which--had I not before Gazed on their mightier Parents, where the pine Sits on more shaggy summits, and where roar[nh] The thundering Lauwine[454]--might be worshipped more; But I have seen the soaring Jungfrau rear[ni] Her never-trodden snow, and seen the hoar Glaciers of bleak Mont Blanc both far and near-- And in Chimari heard the Thunder-Hills of fear,
LXXIV.
Th' Acroceraunian mountains of old name; And on Parnassus seen the Eagles fly Like Spirits of the spot, as 'twere for fame. For still they soared unutterably high: I've looked on Ida with a Trojan's eye; Athos--Olympus--Ætna.--Atlas--made These hills seem things of lesser dignity; All, save the lone Soracte's height, displayed Not _now_ in snow, which asks the lyric Roman's aid
LXXV.
For our remembrance, and from out the plain Heaves like a long-swept wave about to break, And on the curl hangs pausing: not in vain May he, who will, his recollections rake, And quote in classic raptures, and awake The hills with Latian echoes--I abhorred Too much, to conquer for the Poet's sake,[455] The drilled dull lesson, forced down word by word In my repugnant youth,[456] with pleasure to record
LXXVI.
Aught that recalls the daily drug which turned My sickening memory; and, though Time hath taught My mind to meditate what then it learned,[nj] Yet such the fixed inveteracy wrought[nk] By the impatience of my early thought, That, with the freshness wearing out before My mind could relish what it might have sought, If free to choose, I cannot now restore Its health--but what it then detested, still abhor.[nl]
LXXVII.
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 Cæsar 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 Cæsar, 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 Cæsars 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 Cæsar'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 unpreparéd 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 Cæsar'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 hyæna 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 Laocoön'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 belovéd 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, archæologist; Giacomo Morelli, 1745-1819, bibliographer and scholar (the architect Cosimo Morelli, born 1732, died in 1812); Leopoldo Conte de Cicognara, 1767-1834, archæologist; 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 archæologist, 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 supernè [ex specula aliqua eminentiore] urbem contempletur, turritam telluris imaginem medio Oceano figuratam se putet inspicere." [_De Venetæ 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 _Rhapsodiæ 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, ætat. 70, relicto filio notho." But his Αὐτοεπιτάφιον [Au)toepita/phion] implies that he was satisfied with himself.
"Quem non res hominum, non omnis ceperat ætas, Scribentem capit hæc Coccion urna brevis."
Cybele (sometimes written Cybelle and Cybēle), 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 Lacedæmonian general, to the strangers who praised the memory of her son.
[Βρασίδας γὰρ ἦν μὲν ἀνὴρ ἀγαθὸς [Brasi/das ga\r ê~)n me\n a)nê\r a)gatho\s], ῇῃπολλοὶ δ' ἐκείνου κρείσσονες ἐν τῇ Σπάρτῃ [polloi\ d' e)kei/nou krei/ssones e)n tê~| Spa/rtê|]. 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 archæologists 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. _À 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, Cæsar 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 Παντελεήμων [Panteleê/môn], 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 Cremâ, 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_., Lipsiæ, 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 à soy ou à 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 aëry 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 Rhætian 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 aëry 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 Abbé de Sade, in his _Mémoires pour la vie de Pétrarque_ (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 abbé'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 abbé'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 abbé'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 [Arquà 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 Arquà, 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 Arquà." Two years later, October, 1819, he in vain persuaded Moore "to spare a day or two to go with me to Arquà. 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 æger corpore, tranquillus animo frater dego, sine tumultibus, sine erroribus, sine curis, legens semper et scribens, Deum laudans."--Petrarca, _Epistolæ Seniles_, xiv. 6 (_Opera_, Basileæ, 1581, p. 938).
See, too, the notes to _Arquà_ (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, à la cour, un sot de qualité Peut juger de travers avec impunité, A Malherbe, à Racan, préfère Théophile, Et le clinquant du Tasse à tout l'or de Virgile."
Perhaps he divined that the phrase, "un sot de qualité," might glance back on a "noble author," who was about to admit that he could not savour Horace, and who turned aside from Mantua and memories of Virgil to visit Ferrara and the "cell" where Tasso was "encaged." (See Darmesteter's _Notes to Childe Harold_, pp. 201, 217.)
If "the Youth with brow serene," as Hugo calls him, had lived to read _Dédain. A Lord Byron, en_ 1811, he would have passed a somewhat different criticism on French poetry in general--
"En vain vos légions l'environnent sans nombre, Il n'a qu'à se lever pour couvrir de son ombre A la fois tous vos fronts; Il n'a qu'à dire un mot pour couvrir vos voix grèles, Comme un char en passant couvre le bruit des ailes De mille moucherons!" _Les Feuilles d'Automne_, par Victor Hugo, Bruxelles, 1833, pp. 59, 63.]
[ml] {359} _Could mount into a mind like thine_----.--[MS. M. erased.]
[mm] ----_they would not form the Sun_.--[MS. M.]
[420] [In a letter to Murray (August 7, 1817) Byron throws out a hint that Scott might not like being called "the Ariosto of the North," and Murray seems to have caught at the suggestion. "With regard to 'the Ariosto of the North,'" rejoins Byron (September 17, 1817), "surely their themes, Chivalry, war, and love, were as like as can be; and as to the compliment, if you knew what the Italians think of Ariosto, you would not hesitate about that.... If you think Scott will dislike it, say so, and I will expunge." Byron did not know that when Scott was at college at Edinburgh he had "had the audacity to produce a composition in which he weighed Homer against Ariosto, and pronounced him wanting in the balance," or that he "made a practice of reading through ... the _Orlando_ of Ariosto once every year" (see _Memoirs of the Life, etc._, 1871, pp. 12, 747); but the parallel had suggested itself. The key-note of "the harpings of the north," the chivalrous strain of "shield, lance, and brand, and plume and scarf," of "gentle courtesy," of "valour, lion-mettled lord," which the "Introduction to _Marmion_" preludes, had been already struck in the opening lines of the _Orlando Furioso_--
"Le Donne, i Cavaliér', l'arme, gli amori, Le cortesíe, l'audaci imprese io canto."
Scott, we may be assured, was neither disconcerted nor uplifted by the parallel. Many years before (July 6, 1812), Byron had been at pains to inform him that so august a critic as the Prince Regent "preferred you to every bard past and present," and "spoke alternately of Homer and yourself." Of the "placing" and unplacing of poets there is no end. Byron had already been sharply rebuked by the _Edinburgh Review_ for describing _Christabel_ as a "wild and singularly original and beautiful poem," and his appreciation of Scott provoked the expostulation of a friendlier critic. "Walter Scott," wrote Francis Hodgson, in his anonymous _Monitor of Childe Harold_ (1818), "(_credite posteri_, or rather _præposteri_), is designated in the Fourth Canto of _Childe Harold_ as 'the Northern Ariosto,' and (droller still) Ariosto is denominated 'the Southern Scott.' This comes of mistaking horse-chestnuts for chestnut horses."]
[421] {361} The two stanzas xlii. and xliii. are, with the exception of a line or two, a translation of the famous sonnet of Filicaja:--"Italia, Italia, O tu, cui feo la sorte!"--_Poesie Toscane_ 1823, p. 149.
["Italia, Italia, o tu cui feo la sorte Dono infelice di bellezza, ond'hai Funesta dote d'infiniti guai Che in fronte scritti per gran doglia porte: Deh fossi tu men bella, o almen più forte, Onde assai più ti paventasse, o assai T'amasse men, chi del tuo bello ai rai Par che si strugga, e pur ti sfida a morte, Chè or giù dall' Alpi non vedrei torrenti Scender d'armati, nè di sangue tinta Bever l'onda del Po gallici armenti; Nè te vedrei, del non tuo ferro cinta, Pugnar col braccio di straniere genti, Per servir sempre, o vincitrice, o vinta."]
[mn] _And on thy brow in characters of flame_ _To write the words of sorrow and of shame_.--[MS. M. erased.]
[mo] ----_unbetrayed_ _To death by thy vain charms_----.--[MS. M. erased.]
[422] {362} The celebrated letter of Servius Sulpicius to Cicero, on the death of his daughter, describes as it then was, and now is, a path which I often traced in Greece, both by sea and land, in different journeys and voyages. "On my return from Asia, as I was sailing from Ægina towards Megara, I began to contemplate the prospect of the countries around me: Ægina was behind, Megara before me; Piræus on the right, Corinth on the left: all which towns, once famous and flourishing, now lie overturned and buried in their ruins. Upon this sight, I could not but think presently within myself, Alas! how do we poor mortals fret and vex ourselves if any of our friends happen to die or be killed, whose life is yet so short, when the carcasses of so many noble cities lie here exposed before me in one view."--See Middleton's _Cicero_, 1823, ii. 144.
[The letter is to be found in Cicero's _Epist. ad Familiares_, iv. 5. Byron, on his return from Constantinople on July 14, 1810, left Hobhouse at the Island of Zea, and made his own way to Athens. As the vessel sailed up the Saronic Gulf, he would observe the "prospect" which Sulpicius describes.]
[mp] {363} _These carcases of cities_----.--[MS. M. erased.]
[423] ["By the events of the years 1813 and 1814, the house of Austria gained possession of all that belonged to her in Italy, either before or in consequence of the Peace of Campo Formio (October 17, 1797). A small portion of Ferrara, to the north of the Po (which had formed part of the Papal dominions), was ceded to her, as were the Valteline, Bormio, Chiavenna, and the ancient republic of Ragusa. The emperor constituted all these possessions into a separate and particular state, under the title of the kingdom of Venetian Lombardy."--Koch's _History of Europe_, p. 234.]
[424] {364} It is Poggio, who, looking from the Capitoline hill upon ruined Rome, breaks forth into the exclamation, "Ut nunc omni decore nudata, prostrata jaceat, instar Gigantei cadaveris corrupti atque undique exesi."
[See _De Fortunæ Varietate_, ap. _Nov. Thes. Ant. Rom._, ap. Sallengre, i. 502.]
[425] [Compare Milton, _Sonnet_ xxii.--
" ... my noble task, Of which all Europe talks from side to side."]
[mq] {365} _Where Luxury might willingly be born_. _And buried Learning looks forth into fresher morn_,-- [MS. M. erased.]
[426] [The wealth which permitted the Florentine nobility to indulge their taste for modern, that is, refined luxury was derived from success in trade. For example, Giovanni de' Medici (1360-1428), the father of Cosmo and great-grand-father of Lorenzo de' Medici, was a banker and Levantine merchant. As for the Renaissance, to say nothing of Petrarch of Florentine parentage, two of the greatest Italian scholars and humanists--Ficino, born A.D. 1430, and Poliziano, born 1454--were Florentines; and Poggio was born A.D. 1380, at Terra Nuova on Florentine soil.]
[mr] _There, too, the Goddess breathes in stone and fills_.--[MS. M.]
[427] [The statue of Venus de' Medici, which stands in the Tribune of the Uffizzi Gallery at Florence, is said to be a late Greek (first or second century B.C.) copy of an early reproduction, of the Cnidian Aphrodite, the work, perhaps, of one of his sons, Kephisodotos or Timarchos. (See _Histoire de la Sculpture Grecque_, par Maxime Collignon, Paris, 1897, ii. 641.) In a Catalogue Raissonné of _La Galerie de Florence_, 1804, in the editor's possession, which opens with an eloquent tribute to the enlightenment of the Medici, _la fameuse Vénus_ is conspicuous by her absence. She had been deported to Paris by Napoleon, but when Lord Byron spent a day in Florence in April, 1817, and returned "drunk with Beauty" from the two galleries, the lovely lady, thanks to the much-abused "Powers," was once more in her proper shrine.]
[ms] ----_and we draw_ _As from a fountain of immortal hills_.--[MS. M. erased.]
[428] {366} [Byron's contempt for connoisseurs and dilettanti finds expression in _English Bards, etc._, lines 1027-1032, and, again, in _The Curse of Minerva_, lines 183, 184. The "stolen copy" of _The Curse_ was published in the _New Monthly Magazine_ (_Poetical Works_, 1898, i. 453) under the title of _The Malediction of Minerva; or, The Athenian Marble-Market_, a title (see line 7) which must have been invented by and not for Byron. He returns to the charge in _Don Juan_, Canto 11. stanza cxviii. lines 5-9--
" ... a statuary, (A race of mere impostors, when all's done-- I've seen much finer women ripe and real, Than all the nonsense of their stone ideal)."
Even while confessing the presence and power of "triumphal Art" in sculpture, one of "the two most artificial of the Arts" (see his letter to Murray, April 26, 1817), then first revealed to him at Florence, he took care that his enthusiasm should not be misunderstood. He had made bitter fun of the art-talk of collectors, and he was unrepentant, and, moreover, he was "not careful" to incur a charge of indifference to the fine arts in general. Among the "crowd" which found their place in his complex personality, there was "the barbarian," and there was "the philistine," and there was, too, the humourist who took a subtle pleasure in proclaiming himself "a plain man," puzzled by subtleties, and unable to catch the drift of spirits finer than his own.]
[429] {367}
Ὀφθαλμοὺς ἑστιᾶν [O)phthalmou\s e(stia~n] "Atque oculos pascat uterque suos." Ovid., _Amor_., lib. ii. [Eleg. 2, line 6].
[Compare, too, Lucretius, lib. i. lines 36-38--
"Atque ita, suspiciens tereti cervice reposta, Pascit amore avidos, inhians in te, Dea, visus; Eque tuo pendet resupini spiritus ore;"
and _Measure for Measure_, act ii. sc. 2, line 179--
"And feast upon her eyes."]
[mt] {368} _Glowing and all-diffused_----.--[MS. M. erased.]
[430] [As the immortals, for love's sake, divest themselves of their godhead, so do mortals, in the ecstasy of passion, recognize in the object of their love the incarnate presence of deity. Love, like music, can raise a "mortal to the skies" and "bring an angel down." In this stanza there is, perhaps, an intentional obscurity in the confusion of ideas, which are "thrown out" for the reader to shape for himself as he will or can.]
[mu] ----_and our Fate_----[MS. M.]
[431] {369} ["The church of Santa Croce contains much illustrious nothing. The tombs of Macchiavelli, Michael Angelo, Galileo Galilei, and Alfieri make it the Westminster Abbey of Italy" (Letter to Murray, April 26, 1817). Michael Angelo, Alfieri, and Macchiavelli are buried in the south aisle of the church; Galileo, who was first buried within the convent, now rests with his favourite pupil, Vincenzo Viviani, in a vault in the south aisle. Canova's monument to Alfieri was erected at the expense of his so-called widow, Louise, born von Stolberg, and (1772-78) consort of Prince Charles Edward.]
[432] [Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803) is one of numerous real and ideal personages with whom, as he tells us (_Life_, p. 644), Byron was wont to be compared. Moore perceives and dwells on the resemblance. A passage in Alfieri's autobiography (_La Vie de V. A. écrite par Lui-même_, Paris, 1809, p. 17) may have suggested the parallel--
"Voici une esquisse du caractère que je manifestais dans les premières anneés de ma raison naissante. Taciturne et tranquille pour l'ordinaire, mais quelquefois extrêmement pétulant et babillard, presque toujours dans les extrêmes, obstiné et rebelle à la force, fort soumis aux avis qu'on me donnait avec amitié, contenu plutôt par la crainte d'être grondé que par toute autre chose, d'une timidité excessive, et inflexible quand on voulait me prendre à rebours."
The resemblance, as Byron admits, "related merely to our apparent personal dispositions." Both were noble, both were poets, both were "patrician republicans," and both were lovers of pleasure as well as lovers and students of literature; but their works do not provoke comparison. "The quality of 'a narrow elevation' which [Matthew] Arnold finds in Alfieri," is not characteristic of the author of _Childe Harold_ and _Don Juan_.
Of this stanza, however, Alfieri's fine sonnet to Florence may have been the inspiration. I have Dr. Garnett's permission to cite the following lines of his admirable translation (_Italian Literature_, 1898, p. 321):--
"Was Angelo born here? and he who wove Love's charm with sorcery of Tuscan tongue, Indissolubly blent? and he whose song Laid bare the world below to world above? And he who from the lonely valley clove The azure height and trod the stars among? And he whose searching mind the monarch's wrong, Fount of the people's misery did prove?"]
[mv] {370} _Might furnish forth a Universe_----.--[MS. M.]
[mw] _And ruin of thy beauty, shall deny_ _And hath denied, to every other sky_ _Spirits that soar like thine; from thy decay_ {_Still springs some son of the Divinity_} {_Still springs some work of the Divinity_}--[D.] _And gilds thy ruins with reviving ray_-- _And what these were of yore--Canova is to-day_.--[MS. M.]
[433] [Compare "Lines on the Bust of Helen by Canova," which were sent in a letter to Murray, November 25, 1816--
"In this beloved marble view, Above the works and thoughts of man, What nature _could_, but _would not_, do, And Beauty and Canova can."
In _Beppo_ (stanza xlvi.), which was written in October, 1817, there is a further allusion to the genius of Canova.]
[mx] {371} _Their great Contemporary_----.--[MS. M. erased.]
[434] [Dante died at Ravenna, September 14, 1321, and was buried in the Church of S. Francesco. His remains were afterwards transferred to a mausoleum in the friars' cemetery, on the north side of the church, which was raised to his memory by his friend and patron, Guido da Polenta. The mausoleum was restored more than once, and rebuilt in its present form in 1780, at the cost of Cardinal Luigi Valenti Gonzaga. On the occasion of Dante's sexcentenary, in 1865, it was discovered that at some unknown period the skeleton, with the exception of a few small bones which remained in an urn which formed part of Gonzaga's structure, had been placed for safety in a wooden box, and enclosed in a wall of the old Braccioforte Chapel, which lies outside the church towards the Piazza. "The bones found in the wooden box were placed in the mausoleum with great pomp and exultation, the poet being now considered the symbol of a united Italy. The wooden box itself has been removed to the public library."--_Handbook far Northern Italy_, p. 539, note.
The house which Byron occupied during his first visit to Ravenna--June 8 to August 9, 1819--is close to the Cappella Braccioforte. In January, 1820, when he wrote the Fourth Canto of _Don Juan_ ("I pass each day where Dante's bones are laid," stanza civ.), he was occupying a suite of apartments in the Palazzo Guiccioli, No. 328 in the Via di Porta Adriana. Compare Rogers's _Italy_, "Bologna," _Poems_, ii. 118--
"Ravenna! where from Dante's sacred tomb He had so oft, as many a verse declares, Drawn inspiration."]
[435] [The story is told in Livy, lib. xxxviii. cap. 53. "Thenceforth no more was heard of Africanus. He passed his days at Liternum [on the shore of Campania], without thought or regret of Rome. Folk say that when he came to die he gave orders that he should be buried on the spot, and that there, and not at Rome, a monument should be raised over his sepulchre. His country had been ungrateful--no Roman funeral for him." It is said that his sepulchre bore the inscription: "Ingrata patria, cineres meos non habebis." According to another tradition, he was buried with his family at the Porta Capena, by the Cælian Hill.]
[436] [Compare Lucan, _Pharsalia_, i. I--"Bella per Emathios plusquam civilia campos."]
[437] [Petrarch's _Africa_ brought him on the same day (August 23, 1340) offers of the laurel wreath of poetry from the University of Paris and from the Senate of Rome. He chose in favour of Rome, and was crowned on the Capitol, Easter Day, April 8, 1341. "The poet appeared in a royal mantle ... preceded by twelve noble Roman youths clad in scarlet, and the heralds and trumpeters of the Roman Senate."--_Petrarch_, by Henry Reeve, p. 92.]
[438] {372} [Tomasini, in the _Petrarca Redivivus_ (pp. 168-172, ed. 1650), assigns the outrage to a party of Venetians who "broke open Petrarch's tomb, in 1630, and took away some of his bones, probably with the object of selling them." Hobhouse, in _note_ ix., says, "that one of the arms was stolen by a Florentine," but does not quote his authority. (See the notes to H. F. Tozer's _Childe Harold_, p. 302.)]
[439] [Giovanni Boccaccio was born at Paris (or Certaldo) in 1313, passed the greater part of his life at Florence, died and was buried at Certaldo, whence his family are said to have sprung, in 1375. His sepulchre, which stood in the centre of the Church of St. Michael and St. James, known as the Canonica, was removed in 1783, on the plea that a recent edict forbidding burial in churches applied to ancient interments. "The stone that covered the tomb was broken, and thrown aside as useless into the adjoining cloisters" (_Handbook for Central Italy_, p. 171). "Ignorance," pleads Hobhouse, "may share the crime with bigotry." But it is improbable that the "hyæna bigots," that is, the ecclesiastical authorities, were ignorant that Boccaccio was a bitter satirist of Churchmen, or that "he transferred the functions and histories of Hebrew prophets and prophetesses, and of Christian saints and apostles, nay, the highest mysteries and most awful objects of Christian Faith, to the names and drapery of Greek and Roman mythology."--(Unpublished MS. note of S. T. Coleridge, written in his copy of Boccaccio's _Opere_, 4 vols. 1723.) They had their revenge on Boccaccio, and Byron has had his revenge on them.]
[my] _Boccaccio to his parent earth, bequeathed_ _The dust derived from thence--doth it not lie_ _With many a sweet and solemn requiem breathed_ _O'er him who formed the tongue of Italy_ _That music in itself whose harmony_ _Asks for no tune to make it song; No--torn_ _From earth--and scattered while the silent sky_ _Hushed its indignant Winds--with quiet scorn_ _The Hyæna bigots thus forbade a World to mourn_.-- [D. erased.]
[440] {374} [Compare _Beppo_, stanza xliv.--
"I love the language, that soft bastard Latin, Which melts like kisses from a female mouth, And sounds as if it should be writ on satin, With syllables which breathe of the sweet South."
Compare, too, the first sentence of a letter which Byron wrote "on a blank leaf of the volume of 'Corinne,'" which Teresa [Guiccioli] left in forgetfulness in a garden in Bologna: "Amor Mio,--How sweet is this word in your Italian language!" (_Life of Lord Byron_, by Emilio Castelar, P. 145).]
[441] [By "Cæsar's pageant" Byron means the pageant decreed by Tiberius Cæsar. Compare _Don Juan_, Canto XV. stanza xlix.--
"And this omission, like that of the bust Of Brutus at the pageant of Tiberius."
At the public funeral of Junia, wife of Cassius and sister of Brutus, A.D. 22, the busts of her husband and brother were not allowed to be carried in the procession, because they had taken part in the assassination of Julius Cæsar. But none the less, "Præfulgebant Brutus et Cassius eo ipso quod effigies eorum non videbantur" (Tacitus, _Ann._, iii. 76). Their glory was conspicuous in men's minds, because their images were withheld from men's eyes. As Tacitus says elsewhere (iv. 26), "Negatus honor gloriam intendit."]
[mz] {375} _Shelter of exiled Empire_----.--[MS. M. erased.]
[442] [The inscription on Ricci's monument to Dante, in the Church of Santa Croce--"A majoribus ter frustra decretum" --refers to the vain attempts which Florence had made to recover the remains of her exiled and once-neglected poet.]
[443] ["I also went to the Medici chapel--fine frippery in great slabs of various expensive stones, to commemorate fifty rotten and forgotten carcasses. It is unfinished, and will remain so" (Letter to Murray, April 26, 1817). The bodies of the grand-dukes lie in the crypt of the Cappella dei Principi, or Medicean Chapel, which forms part of the Church of San Lorenzo. The walls of the chapel are encrusted with rich marbles and "stones of price, to garniture the edifice." The monuments to Giuliano and Lorenzo de' Medici, son and grandson of Lorenzo the Magnificent, with Michael Angelo's allegorical figures of Night and Morning, Aurora and Twilight, are in the adjoining Cappella dei Depositi, or Sagrestia Nuova.]
[444] {376} [The Duomo, crowned with Brunelleschi's cupola, and rich in sculpture and stained glass, is, as it were, a symbol of Florence, the shrine of art. Browning, in his inspired vision of St. Peter's at Rome in _Christmas Eve_, catches Byron's note to sound a loftier strain--
"Is it really on the earth This miraculous dome of God?"
"It is somewhere mentioned that Michael Angelo, when he set out from Florence to build the dome of St. Peter's, turned his horse round in the road to contemplate that of the cathedral, as it rose in the grey of the morning from among the pines and cypresses of the city, and that he said, after a pause, 'Come te non voglio! Meglio di te non posso.' He never, indeed, spoke of it but with admiration; and, if we may believe tradition, his tomb, by his own desire, was to be so placed in the Santa Croce as that from it might be seen, when the doors of the church stood open, that noble work of Brunelleschi."--Rogers's _Italy: Poems_, ii. 315, note to p. 133, line 5--"Beautiful Florence."]
[445] {377} [Byron, contrary to traditional use (see Wordsworth's sonnet, "Near the Lake of Thrasymene;" and Rogers's _Italy_, see note, p. 378), sounds the final vowel in Thrasymēné. The Greek, Latin, and Italian equivalents bear him out; but, most probably, he gave Thrasymene and himself an extra syllable "vel metri vel euphoniæ causâ."]
[na] _Where Courage perished in unyielding files_.--[MS. M.]
[446] ["Tantusque fuit ardor armorum, adeo intentus pugnæ animus, ut eum motum terræ, qui multarum urbium Italiæ magnas partes, prostravit, avertitque cursu rapidos amnes, marce fluminibus invexit, montes lapsu ingenti proruit, nemo pugnantium senserit" (Livy, xxii. 5). Polybius says nothing about an earthquake; and Ihne (_Hist, of Rome_, ii. 207-210) is also silent; but Pliny (_Hist. Nat._, ii. 84) and Coelius Antipater (ap. Cic., _De Div._, i. 35), who wrote his _Annales_ about a century after the battle of Lake Thrasymenus (B.C. 217), synchronize the earthquake and the battle. Compare, too, Rogers's _Italy_, "The Pilgrim:" _Poems_, 1852, ii. 152--
"From the Thrasymene, that now Slept in the sun, a lake of molten gold, And from the shore that once, when armies met, Rocked to and fro unfelt, so terrible The rage, the slaughter, I had turned away."
Compare, too, Wordsworth's sonnet (No. xii.), "Near the Lake of Thrasymene" (_Works_, 1888, p. 756)--
"When here with Carthage Rome to conflict came, An earthquake, mingling with the battle's shock, Checked not its rage; unfelt the ground did rock, Sword dropped not, javelin kept its deadly aim,-- Now all is sun-bright peace."]
[nb] _Fly to the clouds for refuge and withdraw_ _From their unsteady nests_----.--[MS. M.]
[nc] {379} _Made fat the earth_----.--[MS. M. erased]
[447] No book of travels has omitted to expatiate on the temple of the Clitumnus, between Foligno and Spoleto; and no site, or scenery, even in Italy, is more worthy a description. For an account of the dilapidation of this temple, the reader is referred to _Historical Illustrations of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold_, p. 35.
[448] [Compare Virgil, _Georg_., ii. 146--
"Hinc albi, Clitumne, greges et maxuma taurus Victima, sæpe tuo perfusi flumine sacro."
The waters of certain rivers were supposed to possess the quality of making the cattle which drank from them white. (See Pliny, _Hist. Nat._, ii. 103; and compare Silius Italicus, _Pun._, iv. 545, 546--
" ...et patulis Clitumnus in arvis Candentes gelido perfundit flumine tauros.")
For a charming description of Clitumnus, see Pliny's letter "Romano Suo," _Epist._, viii. 8: "At the foot of a little hill covered with old and shady cypress trees, gushes out a spring, which bursts out into a number of streamlets, all of different sizes. Having struggled, so to speak, out of its confinement, it opens out into a broad basin, so clear and transparent, that you may count the pebbles and little pieces of money which are thrown into it.... The banks are clothed with an abundance of ash and poplar, which are so distinctly reflected in the clear water that they seem to be growing at the bottom of the river, and can easily be counted.... Near it stands an ancient and venerable temple, in which is a statue of the river-god Clitumnus."--_Pliny's Letters_, by the Rev. A. Church and the Rev. W. J. Brodribb, 1872, p. 127.]
[449] {380} [The existing temple, now used as a chapel (St. Salvatore), can hardly be Pliny's _templum priscum_. Hobhouse, in his _Historical Illustrations_, pp. 37-41, defends the antiquity of the "façade, which consists of a pediment supported by four columns and two Corinthian piers, two of the columns with spiral fluting, the others covered with fish-scaled carvings" (_Handbook for Central Italy_, p. 289); but in the opinion of modern archæologists the whole of the structure belongs to the fourth or fifth century of the Christian era. It is, of course, possible, indeed probable, that ancient materials were used when the building was reconstructed. Pliny says the "numerous chapels" dedicated to other deities were scattered round the shrine of Clitumnus.]
[nd] _Upon a green declivity_----.--[MS. M.]
[450] {381} ["On my way back [from Rome], close to the temple by its banks, I got some famous trout out of the river Clitumnus, the prettiest little stream in all poesy."--Letter to Murray, June 4, 1817.]
[ne] _There is a course where Lovers' evening tales_.--[MS. M. erased.]
[451] [By "disgust," a prosaic word which seems to mar a fine stanza, Byron does not mean "distaste," aversion from the nauseous, but "tastelessness," the inability to enjoy taste. Compare the French "Avoir du dégout pour la vie," "To be out of conceit with life." Byron was "a lover of Nature," but it was seldom that he felt her "healing power," or was able to lose himself in his surroundings. But now, for the moment, he experiences that sudden uplifting of the spirit in the presence of natural beauty which brings back "the splendour in the grass, the glory in the flower!"]
[nf] {382} _Making it as an emerald_----.--[D.]
[ng] _Leaps on from rock to rock--with mighty bound_.--[MS. M.]
[452] {383} I saw the Cascata del Marmore of Terni twice, at different periods--once from the summit of the precipice, and again from the valley below. The lower view is far to be preferred, if the traveller has time for one only; but in any point of view, either from above or below, it is worth all the cascades and torrents of Switzerland put together: the Staubach, Reichenbach, Pisse Vache, fall of Arpenaz, etc., are rills in comparative appearance. Of the fall of Schaffhausen I cannot speak, not yet having seen it.
[The Falls of Reichenbach are at Rosenlaui, between Grindelwald and Meiringen; the Salanfe or Pisse-Vache descends into the valley of the Rhone near Martigny; the Nant d'Arpenaz falls into the Arve near Magland, on the road between Cluses and Sallanches.]
[453] Of the time, place, and qualities of this kind of iris, the reader will see a short account, in a note to _Manfred_.[§1] The fall looks so much like "the Hell of waters," that Addison thought the descent alluded to by the gulf in which Alecto[§2] plunged into the infernal regions. It is singular enough, that two of the finest cascades in Europe should be artificial--this of the Velino, and the one at Tivoli. The traveller is strongly recommended to trace the Velino, at least as high as the little lake called _Pie' di Lup_. The Reatine territory was the Italian Tempe (Cicer., _Epist. ad Attic._, lib. iv. 15), and the ancient naturalists ["In lacu Velino nullo non die apparere arcus"] (Plin., _Hist. Nat._, lib. ii. cap. lxii.), amongst other beautiful varieties, remarked the daily rainbows of the lake Velinus. A scholar of great name has devoted a treatise to this district alone. See Ald. Manut., _De Reatina Urb Agroque_, ap. Sallengre, _Nov. Thes. Ant. Rom._, 1735, tom. i. p.773, _sq._
[The "Falls of the Anio," which passed over a wall built by Sixtus V., and plunged into the Grotto of Neptune, were greatly diminished in volume after an inundation which took place in 1826. The New Falls were formed in 1834.]
[[§1] _Manfred_, act ii. sc. 1, note. This Iris is formed by the rays of the sun on the lower part of the Alpine torrents; it is exactly like a rainbow come down to pay a visit, and so close that you may walk into it: this effect lasts till noon.]
[[§2] "This is the gulf through which Virgil's Alecto shoots herself into hell; for the very place, the great reputation of it, the fall of waters, the woods that encompass it, with the smoke and noise that arise from it, are all pointed at in the description ...
"'Est locus Italiæ ... ... densis hunc frondibus atrum Urguet utrimque latus nemoris, medioque fragosus Dat sonitum saxis et torto vertice torrens. Hic specus horrendum et sævi spiracula Ditis Monstrantur, ruptoque ingens Acheronte vorago Pestiferas aperit fauces.' _Æneid_, vii. 563-570.
It was indeed the most proper place in the world for a Fury to make her exit ... and I believe every reader's imagination is pleased when he sees the angry Goddess thus sinking, as it were, in a tempest, and plunging herself into Hell, amidst such a scene of horror and confusion."--_Remarks on several Parts of Italy_, by Joseph Addison, Esq., 1761, pp. 100. 101.
[nh] {385}
_Dares not ascend the summit_---- or, _Clothes a more rocky summit_----.--[MS. M. erased.]
[454] In the greater part of Switzerland, the avalanches are known by the name of lauwine.
[Byron is again at fault with his German. "Lawine" (see Schiller, _Wilhelm Tell_, act iii. sc. 3) signifies an avalanche, not avalanches. In stanza xii. line 7 a similar mistake occurs. It may seem strange that, for the sake of local colouring, or for metrical purposes, he should substitute a foreign equivalent which required a note, for a fine word already in vogue. But in 1817 "avalanche" itself had not long been naturalized. Fifty years before, the Italian _valanca_ and _valanche_ had found their way into books of travel, but "avalanche" appears first (see _N. Eng. Dict._, art. "Avalanche") in 1789, in Coxe's _Trav. Switz._, xxxviii. ii. 3, and in poetry, perhaps, in Wordsworth's _Descriptive Sketches_, which were written in 1791-2. Like "cañon" and "veldt" in our own day, it might be regarded as on probation. But the fittest has survived, and Byron's unlovely and misbegotten "lauwine" has died a natural death.]
[ni] _But I have seen the virgin Jungfrau rear_.--[D.]
[455] {386} These stanzas may probably remind the reader of Ensign Northerton's remarks, "D--n Homo," etc.;[§] but the reasons for our dislike are not exactly the same. I wish to express, that we become tired of the task before we can comprehend the beauty; that we learn by rote before we can get by heart; that the freshness is worn away, and the future pleasure and advantage deadened and destroyed, by the didactic anticipation, at an age when we can neither feel nor understand the power of compositions which it requires an acquaintance with life, as well as Latin and Greek, to relish, or to reason upon. For the same reason, we never can be aware of the fulness of some of the finest passages of Shakspeare ("To be or not to be," for instance), from the habit of having them hammered into us at eight years old, as an exercise, not of mind, but of memory: so that when we are old enough to enjoy them, the taste is gone, and the appetite palled. In some parts of the continent, young persons are taught from more common authors, and do not read the best classics till their maturity. I certainly do not speak on this point from any pique or aversion towards the place of my education. I was not a slow, though an idle boy; and I believe no one could, or can be, more attached to Harrow than I have always been, and with reason;--a part of the time passed there was the happiest of my life; and my preceptor, the Rev. Dr. Joseph Drury, was the best and worthiest friend I ever possessed, whose warnings I have remembered but too well, though too late when I have erred,--and whose counsels I have but followed when I have done well or wisely. If ever this imperfect record of my feelings towards him should reach his eyes, let it remind him of one who never thinks of him but with gratitude and veneration--of one who would more gladly boast of having been his pupil, if, by more closely following his injunctions, he could reflect any honour upon his instructor.
[[§] "'Don't pretend to more ignorance than you have, Mr. Northerton; I suppose you have heard of the Greeks and Trojans, though, perhaps, you have never read Pope's Homer.'--'D--n Homer with all my heart,' says Northerton: 'I have the marks of him ... yet. There's Thomas of our regiment always carries a Homo in his pocket.'"--_The History of Tom Jones_, by H. Fielding, vii. 12.]
[456] [The construction is somewhat involved, but the meaning is obvious. As a schoolboy, the Horatian Muse could not tempt him to take the trouble to construe Horace; and, even now, Soracte brings back unwelcome memories of "confinement's lingering hour," say, "3 quarters of an hour past 3 o'clock in the afternoon, 3rd school" (see _Life_, p. 28). Moore says that the "interlined translations" on Byron's school-books are "a proof of the narrow extent of his classical attainments." He must soon have made up for lost time, and "conquered for the poet's sake," as numerous poetical translations from the classics, including the episode of Nisus and Euryalus, evidently a labour of love, testify. Nor, too, does the trouble he took and the pride he felt in _Hints from Horace_ correspond with this profession of invincible distaste.]
[nj] {388} _My mind to analyse_----.--[MS. M.]
[nk] _Yet such the inveterate impression_----.--[MS. M. erased.]
[nl] ----_but what it then abhorred must still abhor_.--[MS. M.]
[nm] {389} ----_in her tearless woe_.--[MS. M.]
[457] [The tomb of the Scipios, by the Porta Latina, was discovered by the brothers Sassi, in May, 1780. It consists of "several chambers excavated in the tufa." One of the larger chambers contained the famous sarcophagus of L. Scipio Barbatus, the great-grandfather of Scipio Africanus, which is now in the Vatican in the Atrio Quadrate. When the sarcophagus was opened, in 1780, the skeleton was found to be entire. The bones were collected and removed by Angelo Quirini to his villa at Padua. The chambers contained numerous inscriptions, which were detached and removed to the Vatican. Hobhouse (_Hist. Illust_., pp. 169-171) is at pains to point out that the discovery of 1780 confirmed the authenticity of an inscription to Lucius, son of Barbatus Scipio, which had been brought to light in 1615, and rejected by the Roman antiquaries as a forgery. He prints two of the inscriptions (_Handbook for Rome_, pp. 278, 350, 351, ed. 1899).]
[458] [The sepulchres were rifled, says Hobhouse (_ibid_., p. 173), "either to procure the necessary relics for churches dedicated to Christian saints or martyrs, or" (a likelier hypothesis) "with the expectation of finding the ornaments ... buried with the dead. The sarcophagi were sometimes transported from their site and emptied for the reception of purer ashes." He instances those of Innocent II. and Clement XII., "which were certainly constructed for heathen tenants."]
[459] {390} [The reference is to the historical inundations of the Tiber, of which a hundred and thirty-two have been recorded from the foundation of the city down to December, 1870, when the river rose to fifty-six feet--thirty feet above its normal level.]
[460] [The Goths besieged and sacked Rome under Alaric, A.D. 410, and Totila, 546. Other barbarian invaders--Genseric, a Vandal, 455; Ricimer, a Sueve, 472; Vitiges, a Dalmatian, 537; Arnulph, a Lombard, 756--may come under the head of "Goth." "The Christian," "from motives of fanaticism"--Theodosius, for instance, in 426; and Stilicho, who burned the Sibylline books--despoiled, mutilated, and pulled down temples. Subsequently, popes, too numerous to mention, laid violent hands on the temples for purposes of repair, construction, and ornamentation of Christian churches. More than once ancient structures were converted into cannon-balls. There were, too, Christian invaders and sackers of Rome: Robert Guiscard (Hofmann calls him Wiscardus), in 1004; Frederic Barbarossa, in 1167; the Connétable de Bourbon, in 1527, may be instanced. "Time and War" speak for themselves. For "Flood," _vide supra_. As for "Fire," during the years 1082-84 the Emperor Henry IV. burnt "a great part of the Leonine city;" and Guiscard "burnt the town from the Flaminian gate to the Antonine column, and laid waste the Esquiline to the Lateran; thence he set fire to the region from that church to the Coliseum and the Capitol." Of earthquakes Byron says nothing; but there were earthquakes, e.g. in 422 and 1349. Another foe, a destroying angel who "wasteth at noonday," modern improvement, had not yet opened a seventh seal. (See _Historical Illustrations_, pp. 91-168.)]
[nn] {391} _She saw her glories one by one expire_.--[MS. M.]
[461] [Compare Macaulay's _Lays of Ancient Rome_, "Prophecy of Capys," stanza xxx.--
"Blest and thrice blest the Roman Who sees Rome's brightest day, Who sees that long victorious pomp Wind down the Sacred Way, And through the bellowing Forum, And round the Suppliant's Grove, Up to the everlasting gates Of Capitolian Jove."]
[no] _The double night of Ruin_----.--[MS. M.]
[462] [The construction is harsh and puzzling. Apparently the subject of "hath wrapt" is the "double night of ages;" the subjects of "wrap," the "night of ages" and the "night of Ignorance;" but, even so, the sentence is ambiguous. Not less amazing is the confusion of metaphors. Rome is a "desert," through which we steer, mounted, presumably, on a camel--the "ship of the desert." Mistaken associations are, as it were, stumbling-blocks; and no sooner have we verified an association, discovered a ruined temple in the exact site which Livy's "pictured page" has assigned to it--a discovery as welcome to the antiquarian as water to the thirsty traveller--than our theory is upset, and we perceive that we have been deluded by a mirage.]
[463] {392} Orosius gives 320 for the number of triumphs [i.e. from Romulus to the double triumph of Vespasian and Titus (_Hist._, vii. 9)]. He is followed by Panvinius; and Panvinius by Mr. Gibbon and the modern writers.
[np] _Alas, for Tully's voice, and Titus' sway_ _And Virgil's verse; the first and last must be_ _Her Resurrection_----.--[MS. M.]
[464] Certainly, were it not for these two traits in the life of Sylla, alluded to in this stanza, we should regard him as a monster unredeemed by any admirable quality. The _atonement_ of his voluntary resignation of empire may perhaps be accepted by us, as it seems to have satisfied the Romans, who if they had not respected must have destroyed him. There could be no mean, no division of opinion; they must have all thought, like Eucrates, that what had appeared ambition was a love of glory, and that what had been mistaken for pride was a real grandeur of soul.--("Seigneur, vous changez toutes mes idées, de la façon dont je vous vois agir. Je croyois que vous aviez de l'ambition, mais aucun amour pour la gloire; je voyois bien que votre âme étoit haute; mais je ne soupçonnois pas qu'elle fut grande."--_Dialogue de Sylla et d'Eucrate_.) _Considérations ... de la Grandeur des Romains, etc._, Paris, 1795, ii. 219. By Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu.
[Stanza lxxxiii. indicates the following events in the life of Sulla. In B.C. 81 he assumed the name of Felix (or, according to Plutarch, Epaphroditus, Plut, _Vitæ_, 1812, iv. 287), (line 1). Five years before this, B.C. 86, during the consulship of Marius and Cinna, his party had been overthrown, and his regulations annulled; but he declined to return to Italy until he had brought the war against Mithridates to a successful conclusion, B.C. 83 (lines 3-6). In B.C. 81 he was appointed dictator (line 7), and B.C. 79 he resigned his dictatorship and retired into private life (line 9).]
[nq] {394} ----_how supine_ _Into such dust deserted Rome should fade,_ or, _In self-woven sackcloth Rome should thus be laid_.--[MS. M. erased.]
[nr] _The Earth beneath her shadow and displayed_ _Her wings as with the horizon and was hailed,_ or, _The rushings of his wings and was Almighty hailed_.--[MS. M. erased.]
[ns] _Sylla supreme of Victors--save our own_ _The ablest of Usurpers--Cromwell--he_ _Who swept off Senates--while he hewed the Throne_ _Down to a block--immortal Villain! See_ _What crimes, etc_.--[MS. M.]
[465] On the 3rd of September Cromwell gained the victory of Dunbar [1650]; a year afterwards he obtained "his crowning mercy" of Worcester [1651]; and a few years after [1658], on the same day, which he had ever esteemed the most fortunate for him, died.
[466] {395} [The statue of Pompey in the Sala dell' Udinanza of the Palazzo Spada is no doubt a portrait, and belongs to the close of the Republican period. It cannot, however, with any certainty be identified with the statue in the Curia, at whose base "great Cæsar fell." (See _Antike Bildwerke in Rom._, F. Matz, F. von Duhn, i. 309.)]
[467] {396} [The bronze "Wolf of the Capitol" in the Palace of the Conservators is unquestionably ancient, belonging to the end of the sixth or beginning of the fifth century B.C., and probably of Græco-Italian workmanship. The twins, as Winckelmann pointed out (see Hobhouse's _note_), are modern, and were added under the impression that this was the actual bronze described by Cicero, _Cat._, iii. 8, and Virgil, _Æn._, viii. 631. (See _Monuments de l'Art Antique_, par Olivier Rayet, Paris, 1884, Livraison II, Planche 7.)]
[468] [The Roman "things" whom the world feared, set the fashion of shedding their blood in the pursuit of glory. The nations, of modern Europe, "bastard" Romans, have followed their example.]
[469] {397} [Compare _The Age of Bronze_, v.--"The king of kings, and yet of slaves the slave."]
[470] [In _Comparison of the Present State of France with that of Rome_, etc., published in the _Morning Post_, September 21, 1802, Coleridge speaks of Buonaparte as the "new Cæsar," but qualifies the expression in a note: "But if reserve, if darkness, if the employment of spies and informers, if an indifference to all religions, except as instruments of state policy, with a certain strange and dark superstition respecting fate, a blind confidence in his destinies,--if these be any part of the Chief Consul's character, they would force upon us, even against our will, the name and history of Tiberius."--_Essays on His Own Times_, ii. 481.]
[471] [According to Suetonius, i. 37, the famous words, _Veni Vidi, Vici_, were blazoned on litters in the triumphal procession which celebrated Cæsar's victory over Pharnaces II., after the battle of Zela (B.C. 47).]
[472] {398} [By "flee" in the "Gallic van," Byron means "fly towards, not away from, the foe." He was, perhaps, thinking of the Biblical phrases, "flee like a bird" (_Ps_. xi. 1), and "flee upon horses" (_Isa_. xxx. 16); but he was not careful to "tame down" words to his own use and purpose.]
[nt] _Of pettier passions which raged angrily_.--[MS. M. erased.]
[nu] _At what? can he reply? his lusting is unnamed_.--[MS. M. erased.]
[nv] ----_How oft--how long, oh God!_--[MS. M. erased.]
[473] {399} ----"Omnes poene veteres; qui nihil cognosci, nihil percipi, nihil sciri posse dixerunt; augustos sensus, imbecillos animos, brevia curricula vitar, et (ut Democritus) in profundo veritatem esse demersam; opinionibus et institutis omnia teneri; nihil veritati relinqui: deinceps omnia tenebris circumfusa esse dixerunt."--_Academ._, lib. I. cap. 12. The eighteen hundred years which have elapsed since Cicero wrote this, have not removed any of the imperfections of humanity: and the complaints of the ancient philosophers may, without injustice or affectation, be transcribed in a poem written yesterday.
[474] [Compare Gray's _Elegy_, stanza xv.--
"Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear."]
[nw] _And thus they sleep in some dull certainty_.--[MS. M. erased.]
[475] [Compare _As You Like It_, act ii. sc. 7, lines 26-28--
"And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot; And thereby hangs a tale."]
[nx] {400} _For such existence is as much to die_.--[MS. M. erased.] or, _Bequeathing their trampled natures till they die_.--[MS. M. erased.]
[476] [In his speech _On the Continuance of the War with France_, which Pitt delivered in the House of Commons, February 17, 1800, he described Napoleon as "the child and champion of Jacobinism." At least the phrase occurs in the report which Coleridge prepared for the _Morning Post_ of February 18, 1800, and it appears in the later edition in the Collection of Pitt's speeches. "It does not occur in the speech as reported by the _Times_." It is curious that in the jottings which Coleridge, Parliamentary reporter _pro hac vice_, scrawled in pencil in his note-book, the phrase appears as "the nursling and champion of Jacobinism;" and it is possible that the alternative of the more rhetorical but less forcible "child" was the poet's handiwork. It became a current phrase, and Coleridge more than once reverts to it in the articles which he contributed to the _Morning Post_ in 1802. (See _Essays on His Own Times_, ii. 293, and iii. 1009-1019; and _Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge_, 1895, i. 327, note.)]
[ny] {401} _Deep in the lone Savannah_----.--[MS. M. erased.]
[nz] _Too long hath Earth been drunk with blood and crime_.--[MS. M. erased.]
[oa] _Her span of freedom hath but fatal been_ _To that of any coming age or clime_.--[MS. M.]
[477] {402} [By the "base pageant" Byron refers to the Congress of Vienna (September, 1815); the "Holy Alliance" (September 26), into which the Duke of Wellington would not enter; and the Second Treaty of Paris, November 20, 1815.]
[478] [Compare Shelley's _Hellas: Poems_, 1895, ii. 358--
"O Slavery! thou frost of the world's prime, Killing its flowers, and leaving its thorns bare!"]
[479] [Shelley chose the first two lines of this stanza as the motto for his _Ode to Liberty_.]
[480] Alluding to the tomb of Cecilia Metella, called Capo di Bove. [Four words, and two initials, compose the whole of the transcription which, whatever was its ancient position, is now placed in front of this towering sepulchre: "CÆCILIÆ. Q. CRETICI. F. METELLÆ. CRASSI."
"The Savelli family were in possession of the fortress in 1312, and the German army of Henry VII. marched from Rome, attacked, took, and burnt it, but were unable to make themselves, by force, masters of the citadel--that is, the tomb." The "fence of stone" refers to the quadrangular basement of concrete, on which the circular tower rests. The tower was originally coated with marble, which was stripped off for the purpose of making lime. The work of destruction is said to have been carried out during the interval between Poggio's (see his _De Fort. Var._, ap. Sall., _Nov. Thes. Ant. Rom._, 1735, i. 501, _sq._) first and second visits to Rome. (See Hobhouse's _Hist. Illust._, pp. 202, 203; _Handbook for Rome_, p. 360.)]
[ob] {403} _So massily begirt--what lay?_----.--[MS. M.]
[oc] {404} _Love from her duties--still a conqueress in the war_.--[MS. M. erased.]
[481] Ον οἱ θεοὶ φιλοῦσιν ἀποθνήσκει νέος [On oi(theoi\ philou~sin a)pothnê/skei ne/os] Τὸ γὰρ θανεῖν οὐχ αἰσχρὸν, ἀλλ' αἰσχρῶς θανεῖν [To\ ga\r thanei~n ou)ch ai)schro\n, a)ll' ai)schrô~s thanei~n]. _Gnomici Poetæ Græci_, R. F. P. Brunck, 1784, p. 231.
[482] {405} ["It is more likely to have been the pride than the love of Crassus which raised so superb a memorial to a wife whose name is not mentioned in history, unless she be supposed to be that lady whose intimacy with Dolabella was so offensive to Tullia, the daughter of Cicero, or she who was divorced by Lentulus Spinther, or she, perhaps the same person, from whose ear the son of Æsopus transferred a precious jewel to enrich his daughter (_vide_ Hor., _Sat._, ii. 3. 239)" (_Hist. Illust._, p. 200). The wealth of Crassus was proverbial, as his _agnomen_, Dives, testifies (Plut., _Crassus_, ii., iii., Lipsiæ, 1813, v. 156, _sq._).]
[od] {406}
_Till I had called forth even from the mind_.--[MS. M. erased.] ----_with heated mind_.--[MS. M.]
[oe] _I have no home_----.--[MS. M.]
[483] {407} [Compare Rogers's _Italy:_ "Rome" (_Poems_, 1852), ii. 169--
"Or climb the Palatine, * * * * * Long while the seat of Rome, hereafter found Less than enough (so monstrous was the brood Engendered there, so Titan-like) to lodge One in his madness; and inscribe my name-- My name and date, on some broad aloe-leaf That shoots and spreads within those very walls Where Virgil read aloud his tale divine, When his voice faltered and a mother wept Tears of delight!"[§]
And compare Shelley's _Poetical Works_, 1895, iii. 276--
"Rome has fallen; ye see it lying Heaped in undistinguished ruin: Nature is alone undying."]
[§] [At the words _Tu Marcellus eris, etc_. (_vide_ Tib. Cl. Donatus, _Life of Virgil_ (Virg., _Opera_), Leeuwarden, 1627, vol. i.).]
[of] ----_wherein have creeped_ _The Reptiles which_.---- or, _Scorpion and blindworm_----.--[MS. M. erased.]
[484] The Palatine is one mass of ruins, particularly on the side towards the Circus Maximus. The very soil is formed of crumbled brickwork. Nothing has been told--nothing can be told--to satisfy the belief of any but the Roman antiquary. [The Palatine was the site of the successive "Domus" of Augustus, Tiberius, and Caligula, and of the _Domus Transitoria_ of Nero, which perished when Rome was burnt. Later emperors--Vespasian, Domitian, Septimius Severus--added to the splendour of the name-giving Palatine. "The troops of Genseric," says Hobhouse (_Hist. Illust._, p. 206), "occupied the Palatine, and despoiled it of all its riches... and when it again rises, it rises in ruins." Systematic excavations during the last fifty years have laid bare much that was hidden, and "learning and research" have in parts revealed the "obliterated plan;" but, in 1817, the "shapeless mass of ruins" defied the guesses of antiquarians. "Your walks in the Palatine ruins ... will be undisturbed, unless you startle a fox in breaking through the brambles in the corridors, or burst unawares through the hole of some shivered fragments into one of the half-buried chambers, which the peasants have blocked up to serve as stalls for their jackasses, or as huts for those who watch the gardens" (_Hist. Illust._, p. 212).]
[485] {408} The author of the _Life of Cicero_, speaking of the opinion entertained of Britain by that orator and his contemporary Romans, has the following eloquent passage:--"From their railleries of this kind, on the barbarity and misery of our island, one cannot help reflecting on the surprising fate and revolutions of kingdoms; how Rome, once the mistress of the world, the seat of arts, empire, and glory, now lies sunk in sloth, ignorance, and poverty; enslaved to the most cruel as well as to the most contemptible of tyrants, superstition and religious imposture; while this remote country, anciently the jest and contempt of the polite Romans, is become the happy seat of liberty, plenty, and letters; flourishing in all the arts and refinements of civil life; yet running, perhaps, the same course which Rome itself had run before it, from virtuous industry to wealth; from wealth to luxury; from luxury to an impatience of discipline and corruption of morals: till, by a total degeneracy and loss of virtue, being grown ripe for destruction, it fall a prey at last to some hardy oppressor, and, with the loss of liberty, losing everything that is valuable, sinks gradually again into its original barbarism." (See _Life of M. Tullius Cicero_, by Conyers Middleton, D.D., 1823, sect. vi. vol. i. pp. 399, 400.)
[og] {409} _Oh, ho, ho, ho--thou creature of a Man_.--[MS. M. erased.]
[oh] _And show of Glory's gewgaws in the van_ _And the Sun's rays with flames more dazzling filled_.--[MS. M.]
[486] [The "golden roofs" were those of Nero's _Domus Aurea_, which extended from the north-west corner of the Palatine to the Gardens of Mæcenas, on the Esquiline, spreading over the sites of the Temple of Vesta and Rome on the platform of the Velia, the Colosseum, and the Thermæ of Titus, as far as the Sette Sale. "In the fore court was the colossal statue of Nero. The pillars of the colonnade, which measured a thousand feet in length, stood three deep. All that was not lake, or wood, or vineyard, or pasture, was overlaid with plates of gold, picked out with gems and mother-of-pearl" (Suetonius, vi. 31; Tacitus, _Ann._, xv. 42). Substructions of the _Domus Aurea_ have been discovered on the site of the Baths of Titus and elsewhere, but not on the Palatine itself. Martial, _Epig._ 695 (_Lib. Spect._, ii.), celebrates Vespasian's restitution of the _Domus Aurea_ and its "policies" to the people of Rome.
"Hic ubi sidereus propius videt astra colossus Et crescunt media pegmata celsa via, Invidiosa feri radiabant atria regis Unaque jam tola stabat in urbe domus."
"Here where the Sun-god greets the Morning Star, And tow'ring scaffolds block the public way, Fell Nero's loathed pavilion flashed afar, Erect and splendid 'mid the town's decay."]
[487] {410} [By the "nameless" column Byron means the column of Phocas, in the Forum. But, as he may have known, it had ceased to be nameless when he visited Rome in 1817. During some excavations which were carried out under the auspices of the Duchess of Devonshire, in 1813, the soil which concealed the base was removed, and an inscription, which attributes the erection of the column to the Exarch Smaragdus, in honour of the Emperor Phocas, A.D. 608, was brought to light. The column was originally surmounted by a gilded statue, but it is probable that both column and statue were stolen from earlier structures and rededicated to Phocas. Hobhouse (_Hist. Illust._, pp. 240-242) records the discovery, and prints the inscription _in extenso._]
[oi] ----_all he doth deface_.--[MS. M.]
[488] The column of Trajan is surmounted by St. Peter; that of Aurelius by St. Paul. (See _Hist. Illust._, p. 214.)
[The column was excavated by Paul III. in the sixteenth century. In 1588 Sixtus V. replaced the bronze statue of Trajan holding a gilded globe, which had originally surmounted the column, by a statue of St. Peter, in gilt bronze. The legend was that Trajan's ashes were contained in the globe. They are said to have been deposited by Hadrian in a golden urn in a vault under the column. It is certain that when Sixtus V. opened the chamber he found it empty. A medal was cast in honour of the erection of the new statue, inscribed with the words of the Magnificat, "_Exaltavit humiles_."]
[489] {411} Trajan was _proverbially_ the best of the Roman princes; and it would be easier to find a sovereign uniting exactly the opposite characteristics, than one possessed of all the happy qualities ascribed to this emperor. "When he mounted the throne," says the historian Dion, "he was strong in body, he was vigorous in mind; age had impaired none of his faculties; he was altogether free from envy and from detraction; he honoured all the good, and he advanced them: and on this account they could not be the objects of his fear, or of his hate; he never listened to informers; he gave not way to his anger; he abstained equally from unfair exactions and unjust punishments; he had rather be loved as a man than honoured as a sovereign; he was affable with his people, respectful to the senate, and universally beloved by both; he inspired none with dread but the enemies of his country." (See Eutrop., _Hist. Rom. Brev._ lib. viii. cap. v.; Dion, _Hist. Rom._, lib. lxiii. caps, vi., vii.)
[M. Ulpius Trajanus (A.D. 52-117) celebrated a triumph over the Dacians in 103 and 106. It is supposed that the column which stands at the north end of the Forum Trajanum commemorated the Dacian victories. In 115-16 he conquered the Parthians, and added the province of Armenia Minor to the empire. It was not, however, an absolute or a final victory. The little desert stronghold of Atræ, or Hatra, in Mesopotamia, remained uncaptured; and, instead of incorporating the Parthians in the empire, he thought it wiser to leave them to be governed by a native prince under the suzerainty of Rome. His conquests were surrendered by Hadrian, and henceforth the tide of victory began to ebb. He died on his way back to Rome, at Selinus, in Cilicia, in August, 117.
Trajan's "moderation was known unto all men." Pliny, in his _Panegyricus_ (xxii.), describes his first entry into Rome. He might have assumed the state of a monarch or popular hero, but he walked afoot, conspicuous, pre-eminent, a head and shoulders above the crowd--a triumphal entry; but it was imperial arrogance, not civil liberty, over which he triumphed. "You were our king," he says, "and we your subjects; but we obeyed you as the embodiment of our laws." Martial (_Epig._, x. 72) hails him not as a tyrant, but an emperor--yea, more than an emperor--as the most righteous of lawgivers and senators, who had brought back plain Truth to the light of day; and Claudian (viii. 318) maintains that his glory will live, not because the Parthians had been annexed, but because he was "mitis patriæ." The divine honours which he caused to be paid to his adopted father, Nerva, he refused for himself. "For just reasons," says Pliny, "did the Senate and people of Rome assign thee the name and title of Optimus." Another honour awaited him: "Il est seul Empereur," writes M. De La Berge, "dont les restes aient reposé dans l'enceinte de la ville Eternelle." (See Pliny's _Panegyricus, passim;_ and _Essai sur le règne de Trajan_, Bibliothèque de L'Ecole des Hautes Études, Paris, 1877.)]
[490] {412} [The archæologists of Byron's day were unable to fix the exact site of the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline. "On which side," asks Hobhouse (_Hist. Illust._, p. 224), "stood the citadel, on what the great temple of the Capitol; and did the temple stand in the citadel?" Excavations which were carried on in 1876-7 by Professors Jordan and Lanciani enabled them to identify with "tolerable certainty" the site of the central temple and its adjacent wings, with the site of the Palazzo Caffarelli and its dependencies which occupy the south-east section of the Mons Capitolinus. There are still, however, rival Tarpeian Rocks--one (in the Vicolo della Rupe Tarpea) on the western edge of the hill facing the Tiber, and the other (near the Casa Tarpea) on the south-east towards the Palatine. But if Dionysius, who describes the "Traitor's Leap" as being in sight of the Forum, is to be credited, the "actual precipice" from which traitors (and other criminals, e.g. "bearers of false witness") were thrown must have been somewhere on the southern and now less precipitous escarpment of the mount.]
[oj] {413} _The State Leucadia_----.--[MS. M. erased.]
[491] [M. Manlius, who saved the Capitol from the Gauls in B.C. 390, was afterwards (B.C. 384) arraigned on a charge of high treason by the patricians, condemned, and by order of the tribunes thrown down the Tarpeian Rock. Livy (vi. 20) credits him with a "foeda cupiditas regni"--a "depraved ambition for assuming the kingly power."]
[ok] _There first did Tully's burning accents glow?_ _Yes--eloquently still--the echoes tell me so_.--[D.]
[492] [Compare Gray's _Odes_, "The Progress of Poesy," iii. 3, line 4--"Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn."]
[493] {414} [Nicolas Gabrino di' Rienzo, or Rienzi, commonly called Cola di' Rienzi, was born in 1313. The son of a Roman innkeeper, he owed his name and fame to his own talents and natural gifts. His mission, or, perhaps, ambition, was to free Rome from the tyranny and oppression of the great nobles, and to establish once more "the good estate," that is, a republic. This for a brief period Rienzi accomplished. On May 20, 1347, he was proclaimed tribune and liberator of the Holy Roman Republic "by the authority of the most merciful Lord Jesus Christ." Of great parts, and inspired by lofty aims, he was a poor creature at heart--a "bastard" Napoleon--and success seems to have turned his head. After eight months of royal splendour, purchased by more than royal exactions, the tide of popular feeling turned against him, and he was forced to take refuge in the Castle of St. Angelo (December 15, 1347). Years of wandering and captivity followed his first tribunate; but at length, in 1354, he was permitted to return to Rome, and, once again, after a rapid and successful reduction of the neighbouring states, he became the chief power in the state. But an act of violence, accompanied by treachery, and, above all, the necessity of imposing heavier taxes than the city could bear, roused popular discontent; and during a revolt (October 8, 1354), after a dastardly attempt to escape and conceal himself, he was recognized by the crowd and stabbed to death.
Petrarch first made his acquaintance in 1340, when he was summoned to Rome to be crowned as poet laureate. Afterwards, when Rienzi was imprisoned at Avignon, Petrarch interceded on his behalf with the pope, but, for a time, in vain. He believed in and shared his enthusiasms; and it is probable that the famous Canzone, "Spirto gentil, che quelle membra reggi," was addressed to the Last of the Tribunes.
Rienzi's story forms the subject of a tragedy by Gustave Drouineau, which was played at the Odéon, January 28, 1826; of Bulwer Lytton's novel _The Last of the Tribunes_, which was published in 1835; and of an opera (1842) by Richard Wagner.
(See _Encyc. Met._, art. "Rome," by Professor Villari; La Rousse, _G. Dict. Univ._, art. "Rienzi;" and a curious pamphlet by G. W. Meadley, London, 1821, entitled _Two Pairs of Historical Portraits_, in which an attempt is made to trace a minute resemblance between the characters and careers of Rienzi and the First Napoleon.)]
[494] {415} [The word "nympholepsy" may be paraphrased as "ecstatic vision." The Greeks feigned that one who had seen a nymph was henceforth possessed by her image, and beside himself with longing for an impossible ideal. Compare stanza cxxii. line 7--"The unreached Paradise of our despair." Compare, too, _Kubla Khan_, lines 52, 53--
"For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise."]
[ol] _The lovely madness of some fond despair_.--[MS. M.]
[495] {416} [Byron is describing the so-called Grotto of Egeria, which is situated a little to the left of the Via Appia, about two miles to the south-east of the Porta di Sebastiano: "Here, beside the Almo rivulet [now the Maranna d. Caffarella], is a ruined nymphæum ... which was called the 'Grotto of Egeria,' till ... the discovery of the true site of the Porta Capena fixed that of the grotto within the walls.... It is now known that this nymphæum ... belonged to the suburban villa called Triopio of Herodes Atticus." The actual site of Egeria's fountain is in the grounds of the Villa Mattei, to the south-east of the Cælian, and near the Porta Metronia. "It was buried, in 1867, by the military engineers, while building their new hospital near S. Stefano Rotondo" (Prof. Lanciani).
In lines 5-9 Byron is recalling Juvenal's description of the valley of Egeria, under the mistaken impression that here, and not by "dripping Capena," was the trysting-place of Numa and the goddess. Juvenal has accompanied the seer Umbritius, who was leaving Rome for Capua, as far as the Porta Capena; and while the one waggon, with its slender store of goods, is being loaded, the friends take a stroll--
"In vallem Egeriæ; descendimus et speluncas Dissimiles veris. Quanto præstantius esset Numen aquæ, viridi si margine clauderet undas Herba, nec ingenuum violarent marmora tophum?" _Sat._ I. iii. 17-20.
The grove and shrine of the sacred fountain, which had been let to the Jews (lines 13-16), are not to be confounded with the "artificial caverns" near Herod's Nymphæum, which Juvenal thought were in bad taste, and Byron rejoiced to find reclaimed and reclothed by Nature.]
[496] {417} [Compare Shelley's _Prometheus Unbound_, act iv. (_Poetical Works_, 1893, ii. 97)--
"As a violet's gentle eye Gazes on the azure sky Until its hue grows like what it beholds."]
[497] {418} [Compare _Kubla Khan_, lines 12, 13--
"But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!"]
[498] [Compare _Hamlet_, act ii. sc. 1, line 292--"This most excellent canopy the Air."]
[om] _Feel the quick throbbing of a human heart_ _And the sweet sorrows of its deathless dying_.--[MS. M. erased.] or, _And the sweet sorrow which exults in dying_.--[MS. M. erased.]
[on] {419} _Oh Love! thou art no habitant of Earth_ _An unseen Seraph we believe in thee_ _And can point out thy time and place of birth_.--[D. erased.]
[499] [M. Darmesteter traces the sentiment to a maxim (No. 76) of La Rochefoucauld: "Il est du véritable amour comme de l'apparition des esprits: tout le monde en parle, mais pen de gens en out vu."]
[500] {420} [Compare Dryden on Shaftesbury (_Absalom and Achitophel_, pt. i. lines 156-158)--
"A fiery soul which, working out its way, Fretted the pigmy-body to decay, And o'er-informed the tenement of clay."]
[501] [The Romans had more than one proverb to this effect; e.g. "Amantes Amentes sunt" (_Adagia Veterum_, 1643, p. 52); "Amare et sapere vix Deo conceditur" (Syri _Sententiæ_. 1818, p. 5).]
[oo] {421} _For all are visions with a separate name_.--[D. erased.]
[502] [Circumstance is personified as halting Nemesis--"Pede poena claudo." Hor., _Odes_, III. ii. 32.
Perhaps, too, there is the underlying thought of his own lameness, of Mary Chaworth, and of all that might have been, if the "unspiritual God" had willed otherwise.]
[503] {422} [Compare Milton's _Samson Agonistes_, lines 617-621--
"My griefs not only pain me As a lingering disease, But, finding no redress, ferment and rage; Nor less than wounds immedicable Rankle."]
[504] "At all events," says the author of the _Academical Questions_ [Sir William Drummond], "I trust, whatever may be the fate of my own speculations, that philosophy will regain that estimation which it ought to possess. The free and philosophic spirit of our nation has been the theme of admiration to the world. This was the proud distinction of Englishmen, and the luminous source of all their glory. Shall we then forget the manly and dignified sentiments of our ancestors, to prate in the language of the mother or the nurse about our good old prejudices? This is not the way to defend the cause of truth. It was not thus that our fathers maintained it in the brilliant periods of our history. Prejudice may be trusted to guard the outworks for a short space of time, while reason slumbers in the citadel; but if the latter sink into a lethargy, the former will quickly erect a standard for herself. Philosophy, wisdom, and liberty support each other: he, who will not reason, is a bigot; he, who cannot, is a fool; and he, who dares not, is a slave."--Vol. i. pp. xiv., xv.
[For Sir William Drummond (1770-1828), see _Letters_, 1898, ii. 79, note 3. Byron advised Lady Blessington to read _Academical Questions_ (1805), and instanced the last sentence of this passage "as one of the best in our language" (_Conversations_, pp. 238, 239).]
[505] {423} [Compare _Macbeth_, act iii. sc. 4, lines 24, 25--
"But now I am cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd, bound in To saucy doubts and fears."]
[506] [Compare _The Deformed Transformed_, act i. sc. 2, lines 49, 50--
"Those scarce mortal arches, Pile above pile of everlasting wall."
The first, second, and third stories of the Flavian amphitheatre or Colosseum were built upon arches. Between the arches, eighty to each story or tier, stood three-quarter columns. "Each tier is of a different order of architecture, the lowest being a plain Roman Doric, or perhaps, rather, Tuscan, the next Ionic, and the third Corinthian." The fourth story, which was built by the Emperor Gordianus III., A.D. 244, to take the place of the original wooden gallery (_manianum summum in ligneis_), which was destroyed by lightning, A.D. 217, was a solid wall faced with Corinthian pilasters, and pierced by forty square windows or openings. It has been conjectured that the alternate spaces between the pilasters were decorated with ornamental metal shields. The openings of the outer arches of the second and third stories were probably decorated with statues. The reverse of an _aureus_ of the reign of Titus represents the Colosseum with these statues and a quadriga in the centre. About one-third of the original structure remains _in situ_. The prime agent of destruction was probably the earthquake ("Petrarch's earthquake") of September, 1349, when the whole of the western side fell towards the Cælian, and gave rise to a hill or rather to a chain of hills of loose blocks of travertine and tufa, which supplied Rome with building materials for subsequent centuries. As an instance of wholesale spoliation or appropriation, Professor Lanciani refers to "a document published by Müntz, in the _Revue Arch._, September, 1876," which "certifies that one contractor alone, in the space of only nine months, in 1452, could carry off 2522 cartloads" of travertine (Smith's _Dict. of Gr. and Rom. Ant._, art. "Amphitheatrum;" _Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome_, by R. Lanciani, 1897, p. 375).]
[507] {424} [For a description of the Colosseum by moonlight, see Goethe's letter from Rome, February 2, 1787 (_Travels in Italy_, 1883, p. 159): "Of the beauty of a walk through Rome by moonlight, it is impossible to form a conception ... Peculiarly beautiful at such a time is the Coliseum." See, too, _Corinne, ou L'Italie_, xv. 4, 1819, iii. 32--
"Ce n'est pas connaítre l'impression du Colisée que de ne l'avoir vu que de jour ... la lune est l'astre des ruines. Quelque fois, à travers les ouvertures de l'amphithéàtre, qui semble s'élever jusqu'aux nues, une partie de la voûte du ciel paraît comme un rideau d'un bleu sombre placé derrière l'édifice."
For a fine description of the Colosseum by starlight, see _Manfred_, act iii. sc. 4, lines 8-13.]
[508] {425} [When Byron visited Rome, and for long afterwards, the ruins of the Colosseum were clad with a multitude of shrubs and wild flowers. Books were written on the "Flora of the Coliseum," which were said to number 420 species. But, says Professor Lanciani, "These materials for a _hortus siccus_, so dear to the visitors of our ruins, were destroyed by Rosa in 1871, and the ruins scraped and shaven clean, it being feared by him that the action of roots would accelerate the disintegration of the great structure." If Byron had lived to witness these activities, he might have devoted a stanza to the "tender mercies" of this zealous archæologist.]
[509] {426} [The whole of this appeal to Nemesis (stanzas cxxx.-cxxxviii.) must be compared with the "Domestic Poems" of 1816, the Third Canto of _Childe Harold_ (especially stanzas lxix.-lxxv., and cxi.-cxviii.), and with the "Invocation" in the first act of _Manfred_. It has been argued that Byron inserted these stanzas with the deliberate purpose of diverting sympathy from his wife to himself. The appeal, no doubt, is deliberate, and the plea is followed by an indictment, but the sincerity of the appeal is attested by its inconsistency. Unlike Orestes, who slew his mother to avenge his father, he will not so deal with the "moral Clytemnestra of her lord," requiting murder by murder, but is resolved to leave the balancing of the scale to the omnipotent Time-spirit who rights every wrong and will redress his injuries. But in making answer to his accusers he outruns Nemesis, and himself enacts the part of a "moral" Orestes. It was true that his hopes were "sapped" and "his name blighted," and it was natural, if not heroic, first to persuade himself that his suffering exceeded his fault, that he was more sinned against than sinning, and, so persuaded, to take care that he should not suffer alone. The general purport of plea and indictment is plain enough, but the exact interpretation of his phrases, the appropriation of his dark sayings, belong rather to the biography of the poet than to a commentary on his poems. (For Lady Byron's comment on the "allusions" to herself in _Childe Harold, vide ante_, p. 288, note 1.)]
[op] {427} _Or for my fathers' faults_-----.-[MS. M.]
[oq] {428} 'tis not that now And if my voice break forth--{-it is not that-} I shrink from what is suffered--let him speak decline upon my Who {-humbler in-} {-What-} hath beheld {-me quiver on my-} brow seen my mind's convulsion leave it {-blenched or-} weak? Or {-my internal spirit changed or weak-} {-found my mind convulsed-} a But in this page {-the-} record {-which-} I seek will {-from out of the deep-} {-stands and-} {-of that remorse-} {-Shall stand and when that hour shall come and come-} {-Shall come--though I be ashes--and shall pile heap-} {-It will-} {-come and wreak-} {-In fire the measure-} {-The fiery prophecy-} {-The fullness of my-} {-The fullness of my prophecy or heap-} {-The mountain of my curse-} Not in the air shall these my words disperse {-'Tis written that an hour of deep remorse-} Though I be ashes {-a deep-} far hour shall wreak {-The fullness Thee-} this The deep prophetic fullness of {-my-} verse And pile on human heads the mountain of my curse.--[MS. M.]
[or] {429} If to forgive be "heaping coals of Fire" As God hath spoken--on the heads of foes Mine should lie a Volcano-and rise higher Than o'er the Titans crushed Olympus rose Than Athos soars, or blazing Ætna glows: True--they who stung were petty things--but what Than serpent's sting produce more deadly throes. The Lion may be tortured by the Gnat-- Who sucks the slumberer's blood--the Eagle? no, the Bat.[§]-- [MS. M.]
[§] [The "Bat" was "a sobriquet by which Lady Caroline Lamb was well known in London society." An Italian translation of her novel, _Glenarvon_, was at this time in the press at Venice (see letter to Murray, August 7, 1817), and it is probable that Byron, who declined to interdict its publication, took his revenge in a petulant stanza, which, on second thoughts, he decided to omit. (See note by Mr. Richard Edgcumbe, _Notes and Queries_ eighth series, 1895, viii. 101.)]
[510] [Compare "Lines on hearing that Lady Byron was ill," lines 53-55.]
[511] {431} Whether the wonderful statue which suggested this image be a laquearian gladiator, which, in spite of Winckelmann's criticism, has been stoutly maintained; or whether it be a Greek herald, as that great antiquary positively asserted;[§] or whether it is to be thought a Spartan or barbarian shieldbearer, according to the opinion of his Italian editor; it must assuredly seem _a copy_ of that masterpiece of Ctesilaus which represented "a wounded man dying, who perfectly expressed what there remained of life in him." Montfaucon and Maffei thought it the identical statue; but that statue was of bronze. The Gladiator was once in the Villa Ludovisi, and was bought by Clement XII. The right arm is an entire restoration of Michael Angelo.
[There is no doubt that the statue of the "Dying Gladiator" represents a dying Gaul. It is to be compared with the once-named "Arria and Pætus" of the Villa Ludovisi, and with other sculptures in the museums of Venice, Naples, and Rome, representing "Gauls and Amazons lying fatally wounded, or still in the attitude of defending life to the last," which belong to the Pergamene school of the second century B.C. M. Collignon hazards a suggestion that the "Dying Gaul" is the trumpet-sounder of Epigonos, in which, says Pliny (_Hist. Nat._, xxxiv. 88), the sculptor surpassed all his previous works ("omnia fere prædicta imitatus præcessit in tubicine"); while Dr. H. S. Urlichs (see _The Elder Pliny's Chapters on the History of Art_, translated by K. Jex-Blake, with Commentary and Historical Illustrations, by E. Sellers, 1896, p. 74, note) falls back on Winckelmann's theory that the "statue ... may have been simply the votive-portrait of the winner in the contest of heralds, such as that of Archias of Hybla in Delphoi." (See, too, Helbig's _Guide to the Collection of Public Antiquities in Rome_, Engl. transl., 1895. i. 399; _History of Greek Sculpture_, by A. S. Murray, L.L.D., F.S.A., 1890, ii. 381-383.)]
[§] Either Polyphontes, herald of Laïus, killed by Oedipus; or Kopreas, herald of Eurystheus, killed by the Athenians when he endeavoured to drag the Heraclidæ from the altar of mercy, and in whose honour they instituted annual games, continued to the time of Hadrian; or Anthemocritus, the Athenian herald, killed by the Megarenses, who never recovered the impiety. [See _Hist, of Ancient Art_, translated by G. H. Lodge, 1881, ii. 207.]
[os] Leaning upon his hand, his mut[e] brow Yielding to death but conquering agony.--[MS. M. erased.]
[ot] {432} _From the red gash fall bigly_----.--[MS. M.]
[ou] _Like the last of a thunder-shower_----.--[MS. M.]
[ov] _The earth swims round him_----.--[MS. M. erased.]
[ow] {433} _Slaughtered to make a Roman holiday_.--[MS. M. erased.]
[ox] _Was death and life_----.--[MS. M.]
[oy] _My voice is much_----.--[MS. M. erased.]
[oz] _Yet the colossal skeleton ye pass_.--[MS. M. erased.]
[pa] {434} _The ivy-forest, which its walls doth wear_.--[MS. M. erased.]
[512] Suetonius [Lib. i. cap. xlv.] informs us that Julius Cæsar was particularly gratified by that decree of the senate which enabled him to wear a wreath of laurel on all occasions. He was anxious not to show that he was the conqueror of the world, but to hide that he was bald. A stranger at Rome would hardly have guessed at the motive, nor should we without the help of the historian.
[pb] _The Hero race who trod--the imperial dust ye tread_.--[MS. M. erased.]
[513] This is quoted in the _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, as a proof that the Coliseum was entire, when seen by the Anglo-Saxon pilgrims at the end of the seventh, or the beginning of the eighth, century. A notice on the Coliseum may be seen in the _Historical Illustrations_, p. 263.
["'Quamdiu stabit Colyseus, stabit et Roma; quando cadet Colyseus, cadet Roma; quando cadet Roma, cadet et mundus.' (Beda in 'Excerptis seu Collectaneis,' apud Ducange, _Glossarium ad Scriptores Med., et Infimæ Latinitatis_, tom. ii. p. 407, edit. Basil.) This saying must be ascribed to the Anglo-Saxon pilgrims who visited Rome before the year 735, the æra of Bede's death; for I do not believe that our venerable monk ever passed the sea."--Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, 1855, viii. 281, note.]
[514] {435} "Though plundered of all its brass, except the ring which was necessary to preserve the aperture above; though exposed to repeated fires; though sometimes flooded by the river, and always open to the rain, no monument of equal antiquity is so well preserved as this rotundo. It passed with little alteration from the Pagan into the present worship; and so convenient were its niches for the Christian altar, that Michael Angelo, ever studious of ancient beauty, introduced their design as a model in the Catholic church."--Forsyth's _Italy_, 1816, p. 137.
[The Pantheon consists of two parts, a porch or _pronaos_ supported by sixteen Corinthian columns, and behind it, but "obviously disjointed from it," a rotunda or round temple, 143 feet high, and 142 feet in diameter. The inscription on the portico (M. AGRIPPA, L. F. Cos. tertium. Fecit.) affirms that the temple was built by Agrippa (M. Vipsanius), B.C. 27.
It has long been suspected that with regard to the existing building the inscription was "historically and artistically misleading;" but it is only since 1892 that it has been known for certain (from the stamp on the bricks in various parts of the building) that the rotunda was built by Hadrian. Difficulties with regard to the relations between the two parts of the Pantheon remain unsolved, but on the following points Professor Lanciani claims to speak with certainty:--
(1) "The present Pantheon, portico included, is not the work of Agrippa, but of Hadrian, and dates from A.D. 120-124.
(2) "The columns, capital, and entablature of the portico, inscribed with Agrippa's name, may be original, and may date from 27-25 B.C., but they were first removed and then put together by Hadrian.
(3) "The original structure of Agrippa was rectangular instead of round, and faced the south instead of the north."--_Ruins and Excavations, etc._, by R. Lanciani, 1897, p. 483.]
[pc] {436} ----_the pride of proudest Rome_.--[MS. M. erased.]
[515] {437} The Pantheon has been made a receptacle for the busts of modern great, or, at least, distinguished men. The flood of light which once fell through the large orb above on the whole circle of divinities, now shines on a numerous assemblage of mortals, some one or two of whom have been almost deified by the veneration of their countrymen.
["The busts of Raphael, Hannibal Caracci, Pierrin del Vaga, Zuccari, and others ... are ill assorted with the many modern contemporary heads of ancient worthies which now glare in all the niches of the Rotunda."--_Historical Illustrations_, p. 293.]
[516] This and the three next stanzas allude to the story of the Roman daughter, which is recalled to the traveller by the site, or pretended site, of that adventure, now shown at the Church of St. Nicholas _in Carcere_. The difficulties attending the full belief of the tale are stated in _Historical Illustrations_, p. 295.
[The traditional scene of the "Caritas Romana" is a cell forming part of the substructions of the Church of S. Nicola in Carcere, near the Piazza Montanara. Festus (_De Verb. Signif._, lib. xiv., A. J. Valpy, 1826, ii. 594), by way of illustrating Pietas, tells the story in a few words: "It is said that Ælius dedicated a temple to Pietas on the very spot where a woman dwelt of yore. Her father was shut up in prison, and she kept him alive by giving him the breast by stealth, and, as a reward for her deed, obtained his forgiveness and freedom." In Pliny (Hist. Nat., vii. 36) and in Valerius Maximus (V. 4) it is not a father, but a mother, whose life is saved by a daughter's piety.]
[pd] {438} _Two isolated phantoms_----.--[MS. M.]
[pe] _With her unkerchiefed neck_----.--[MS. M. erased.]
[pf] _Or even the shrill impatient_ [_cries that brook_]. or, _Or even the shrill small cry_----.--[MS. M. erased.]
[pg] _No waiting silence or suspense_----.--[MS. M. erased.]
[517] {439} [It was fabled of the Milky Way that when Mercury held up the infant Hercules to Juno's breast, that he might drink in divinity, the goddess pushed him away, and that drops of milk fell into the void, and became a multitude of tiny stars. The story is told by Eratosthenes of Cyrene (B.C. 276), in his _Catasterismi_ (Treatise on Star Legends), No. 44: _Opusc. Mythol._, Amsterdam, 1688, p. 136.]
[ph] _To its original fountain but repierce_ _Thy sire's heart_----.--[MS. M. erased.]
[518] The castle of St. Angelo. (See _Historical Illustrations._)
[Hadrian's mole or mausoleum, now the Castle of St. Angelo, is situated on the banks of the Tiber, on the site of the "Horti Neronis." "It is composed of a square basement, each side of which measures 247 feet.... A grand circular mole, nearly 1000 feet in circumference, stands on the square basement," and, originally, "supported in its turn a cone of earth covered with evergreens, like the mausoleum of Augustus." A spiral way led to a central chamber in the interior of the mole, which contained, presumably, the porphyry sarcophagus in which Antoninus Pius deposited the ashes of Hadrian, and the tomb of the Antonines. Honorius (A.D. 428) was probably the first to convert the mausoleum into a fortress. The bronze statue of the Destroying Angel, which is placed on the summit, dates from 1740, and is the successor to five earlier statues, of which the first was erected in 1453. The conception and execution of the Moles Hadriana are entirely Roman, and, except in size and solidity, it is in no sense a mimic pyramid.--_Ruins and Excavations, etc._, by R. Lanciani, 1897, p. 554, _sq._]
[pi] {440} _The now spectator with a sanctioned mirth_ _To view the vast design_----.--[MS. M.]
[519] This and the next six stanzas have a reference to the Church of St. Peter's. (For a measurement of the comparative length of this basilica and the other great churches of Europe, see the pavement of St. Peter's, and the _Classical Tour through Italy_, ii. 125, _et seq._, chap, iv.)
[pj] _Look to the dome_----.--[MS. M.]
[520] [Compare _The Prophecy of Dante_, iv. 49-53--
"While still stands The austere Pantheon, into heaven shall soar A dome, its image, while the base expands Into a fane surpassing all before, Such as all flesh shall flock to kneel in--"
Compare, too, Browning's _Christmas Eve_, sect, x.--
"Is it really on the earth, This miraculous dome of God? Has the angel's measuring-rod Which numbered cubits, gem from gem, 'Twixt the gates of the new Jerusalem, Meted it out,--and what he meted, Have the sons of men completed? --Binding ever as he bade, Columns in the colonnade, With arms wide open to embrace The entry of the human race?"]
[pk] {441} _Lo Christ's great dome_----.--[MS.M.]
[521] [The ruins which Byron and Hobhouse explored, March 25, 1810 (_Travels in Albania_, ii. 68-71), were not the ruins of the second Temple of Artemis, the sixth wonder of the world (_vide_ Philo Byzantius, _De Septem Orbis Miraculis_), but, probably, those of "the great gymnasium near the port of the city." In 1810, and for long afterwards, the remains of the temple were buried under twenty feet of earth, and it was not till 1870 that the late Mr. J. T. Wood, the agent of the Trustees of the British Museum, had so far completed his excavations as to discover the foundations of the building on the exact spot which had been pointed out by Guhl in 1843. Fragments of the famous sculptured columns, thirty-six in number, says Pliny (_Hist. Nat._,