Were the sole echoes, save my steed's and mine,
And Vesper bell's that rose the boughs along;
The spectre huntsman of Onesti's line,

His hell-dogs, and their chase, and the fair throng
Which learned from this example not to fly
From a true lover,-shadowed my mind's eye.1

CVII.

Oh, Hesperus! thou bringest all good things-2
Home to the weary, to the hungry cheer,
To the young bird the parent's brooding wings,
The welcome stall to the o'erlaboured steer;
Whate'er of peace about our hearthstone clings,

Whate'er our household gods protect of dear,
Are gathered round us by thy look of rest;
Thou bring'st the child, too, to the mother's breast.

1. [If the Pineta of Ravenna, bois funèbre, invited Byron "to religious meditation," the mental picture of the "spectre huntsman" pursuing his eternal vengeance on "the inexorable dame "- -"that fatal she," who had mocked his woes-must have set in motion another train of thought. Such lines as these would "speak comfortably" to him"Because she deem'd I well deserved to die, And made a merit of her cruelty,

2.

Mine is the ungrateful maid by heaven design'd:
Mercy she would not give, nor mercy shall she find."

"By her example warn'd, the rest beware;

More easy, less imperious, were the fair;

And that one hunting, which the Devil design'd
For one fair female, lost him half the kind.'

Dryden's Theodore and Honoria (sub fine).]
Εσπερε παντα φερεις

Φερεις οινον φερεις αιγα,

Φερεις ματερι παιδα.

Fragment of Sappho.

[Γέσπερε, πάντα φέρων, ὅσα φαίνολις ἐσκέδασ' αἴως

Φέρεις οἴν φέρεις αἶγα, φέρεις ἄπυ ματέρι παῖδα.

Sappho, Memoir, Text, by Henry Thornton Wharton, 1895, p. 136.

"Evening, all things thou bringest

Which dawn spread apart from each other;
The lamb and the kid thou bringest,

Thou bringest the boy to his mother."

J. A. Symonds.

Compare Tennyson's Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After

'Hesper, whom the poet call'd the Bringer home of all good things."]

CVIII.

Soft Hour! which wakes the wish and melts the heart
Of those who sail the seas, on the first day
When they from their sweet friends are torn apart;
Or fills with love the pilgrim on his way
As the far bell of Vesper makes him start,
Seeming to weep the dying day's decay;1
Is this a fancy which our reason scorns?
Ah! surely Nothing dies but Something mourns!

CIX.

When Nero perished by the justest doom
Which ever the Destroyer yet destroyed,
Amidst the roar of liberated Rome,

Of nations freed, and the world overjoyed,
Some hands unseen strewed flowers upon his tomb: 2
Perhaps the weakness of a heart not void
Of feeling for some kindness done, when Power
Had left the wretch an uncorrupted hour.

CX.

But I'm digressing; what on earth has Nero,

Or any such like sovereign buffoons,"

To do with the transactions of my hero,

More than such madmen's fellow man-the moon's?

1.

i. But I'm digressing-what on earth have Nero

And Wordsworth-both poetical buffoons, etc.-[MS.]

"Era già l'ora che volge il disio

Al naviganti, e intenerisce il cuore ;

Lo di ch' han detto ai dolci amici addio;

E che lo nuovo peregrin' damore

Punge, se ode squilla di lontano,

Che paia il giorno pianger che si more."

Dante's Purgatory, canto viii, lines 1-6.

This last line is the first of Gray's Elegy, taken by him without acknowledgment.

2. See Suetonius for this fact.

["The public joy was so great upon the occasion of his death, that the common people ran up and down with caps upon their heads. And yet there were some, who for a long time trimnied up his tomb with spring and summer flowers, and, one while, placed his image upon his rostra dressed up in state robes, another while published proclamations in his name, as if he was yet alive, and would shortly come to Rome again, with a vengeance to all his enemies."-De XII. Cæs., lib. vi. cap. lvii.]

Sure my invention must be down at zero,

And I grown one of many "Wooden Spoons" Of verse, (the name with which we Cantabs please To dub the last of honours in degrees).

CXI.

I feel this tediousness will never do

"T is being too epic, and I must cut down (In copying) this long canto into two; They'll never find it out, unless I own The fact, excepting some experienced few ; And then as an improvement 't will be shown: I'll prove that such the opinion of the critic is From Aristotle passim.-See IIOIHTIKHΣ.1

1. [See De Poeticà, cap. xxiv. See, too, the Preface to Dryden's "Dedication" of the Eneis (Works of John Dryden, 1821, xiv. 130134). Dryden is said to have derived his knowledge of Aristotle from Dacier's translation, and it is probable that Byron derived his from Dryden. See letter to Hodgson (Letters, 1891, v. 284), in which he quotes Aristotle as quoted in Johnson's Life of Dryden.]

CANTO THE FOURTH.

I.

NOTHING SO difficult as a beginning
In poesy, unless perhaps the end;

For oftentimes when Pegasus seems winning

The race, he sprains a wing, and down we tend, Like Lucifer when hurled from Heaven for sinning; Our sin the same, and hard as his to mend, Being Pride,' which leads the mind to soar too far, Till our own weakness shows us what we are.

II.

But Time, which brings all beings to their level,
And sharp Adversity, will teach at last

Man, and, as we would hope,-perhaps the Devil,
That neither of their intellects are vast:

While Youth's hot wishes in our red veins revel,
We know not this-the blood flows on too fast;
But as the torrent widens towards the Ocean,
We ponder deeply on each past emotion."

1. ["Till Pride and worse Ambition threw me down, Warring in Heaven against Heaven's matchless King." Paradise Lost, iv. 40, 41.]

2.

["Time hovers o'er, impatient to destroy,
And shuts up all the passages of joy :

In vain their gifts the bounteous seasons pour,
The fruit autumnal, and the vernal flow'r;

With listless eyes the dotard views the store,

He views, and wonders that they please no more."

Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes.]

III.

As boy, I thought myself a clever fellow,

And wished that others held the same opinion; They took it up when my days grew more mellow, And other minds acknowledged my dominion: Now my sere Fancy "falls into the yellow

Leaf," and Imagination droops her pinion, And the sad truth which hovers o'er my desk Turns what was once romantic to burlesque.

IV.

And if I laugh at any mortal thing,

'T is that I may not weep; and if I weep, "T is that our nature cannot always bring

Itself to apathy, for we must steep

Our hearts first in the depths of Lethe's spring,'
Ere what we least wish to behold will sleep:
Thetis baptized her mortal son in Styx;

A mortal mother would on Lethe fix.

V.

Some have accused me of a strange design
Against the creed and morals of the land,
And trace it in this poem every line:

I don't pretend that I quite understand
My own meaning when I would be very fine;
But the fact is that I have nothing planned,
Unless it were to be a moment merry-
A novel word in my vocabulary.

I.

VI.

To the kind reader of our sober clime
This way of writing will appear exotic;
Pulci 2 was sire of the half-serious rhyme,"
Who sang when Chivalry was more quixotic,

i. Itself to that fit apathy whose deed. -[MS.]
ii. First in the icy depths of Lethe's spring.—[MS.]

iii. Pulci being Father

ii.

--[MS. Alternative reading.]

["... my May of Life

Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf."

Macbeth, act v. sc. 3, lines 22, 23.]

2. [See "Introduction to the Morgante Maggiore," Poetical Works, 1901, iv. 280.]