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PROMETHEUS

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[There is something in the character of Prometheus which early and strongly attracted Byron- as it did Shelley. Byron's first English exercise at Harrow was a paraphrase from a chorus of the Prometheus Vinctus, and there are many allusions to the god in his later works. Indeed his mind wavered almost to the end between the heroic defiance of Prometheus and the cynical defiance of Don Juan.]

TITAN! to whose immortal eyes
The sufferings of mortality,
Seen in their sad reality,

Were not as things that gods despise;
What was thy pity's recompense?
A silent suffering, and intense;
The rock, the vulture, and the chain,
All that the proud can feel of pain,
The agony they do not show,
The suffocating sense of woe,

Which speaks but in its loneliness,
And then is jealous lest the sky
Should have a listener, nor will sigh
Until its voice is echoless.

Titan! to thee the strife was given

Between the suffering and the will,
Which torture where they cannot kill;

And the inexorable Heaven,
And the deaf tyranny of Fate,

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The ruling principle of Hate,

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Which for its pleasure doth create

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And in thy Silence was his Sentence,
And in his Soul a vain repentance,
And evil dread so ill dissembled,
That in his hand the lightnings trembled.

Thy Godlike crime was to be kind,
To render with thy precepts less
The sum of human wretchedness,
And strengthen Man with his own mind;
But baffled as thou wert from high,
Still in thy patient energy,

In the endurance, and repulse

Of thine impenetrable Spirit,

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Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse,

A mighty lesson we inherit: Thou art a symbol and a sign

To Mortals of their fate and force; Like thee, Man is in part divine,

A troubled stream from a pure source;
And Man in portions can foresee
His own funereal destiny,

His wretchedness, and his resistance,
And his sad unallied existence:
To which his Spirit may oppose
Itself and equal to all woes,

And a firm will, and a deep sense,
Which even in torture can descry

Its own concenter'd recompense, Triumphant where it dares defy, And making Death a Victory. DIODATI, July, 1816.

A FRAGMENT

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a quiet of the

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The whole of that of which we are a part?
For life is but a vision - what I see
Of all which lives, alone is life to me;
And being so the absent are the dead,
Who haunt us from tranquillity, and spread
A dreary shroud around us, and invest
With sad remembrancers our hours of

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The absent are the dead - for they are
cold,

And ne'er can be what once we did behold;
And they are changed, and cheerless,

if yet

The unforgotten do not all forget,
Since thus divided — equal must it be
If the deep barrier be of earth or sea;
It may be both — but one day end it must
In the dark union of insensate dust.

or

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The under-earth inhabitants
But mingled millions decomposed to clay ?
- are they
The ashes of a thousand ages spread
Wherever man has trodden or shall tread ?
Or do they in their silent cities dwell
Each in his incommunicative cell?

Or have they their own language? and a

sense

Of breathless being? - darken'd and intense

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As midnight in her solitude? - O Earth!
Where are the past? - and wherefore had
they birth?

The dead are thy inheritors - and we
But bubbles on thy surface; and the key
Of thy profundity is in the grave,
The ebon portal of thy peopled cave,
Where I would walk in spirit, and behold
Our elements resolved to things untold,
And fathom hidden wonders, and explore
The essence of great bosoms now no more.

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DIODATI, July, 1816. [First published, 1830.]

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SPOKEN AT DRURY-LANE THEATRE

[Mr. Sheridan died the 7th of July, 1816, and this monody was written at Diodati on the 17th, at the request of Mr. Douglas Kinnaird. I did as well as I could,' says Lord Byron, but where I have not my choice, I pretend to answer for nothing.' (Letter to Murray, September 29, 1816.) For Byron's admiration of Sheridan, see Letters, passim.]

WHEN the last sunshine of expiring day
In summer's twilight weeps itself away,
Who hath not felt the softness of the hour
Sink on the heart, as dew along the flower?
With a pure feeling which absorbs and

awes

While Nature makes that melancholy pause,
Her breathing moment on the bridge where

Time

Of light and darkness forms an arch sublime,

Who hath not shared that calm so still and deep,

The voiceless thought which would not speak but weep,

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A holy concord—and a bright regret, A glorious sympathy with suns that set? "T is not harsh sorrow-but a tenderer woe, Nameless, but dear to gentle hearts below, Felt without bitterness - but full and clear, A sweet dejection Unmix'd with worldly grief or selfish stain, a transparent tear, Shed without shame and secret without pain.

Even as the tenderness that hour instils When Summer's day declines along the

hills,

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So feels the fulness of our heart and eyes
When all of Genius which can perish dies.
A mighty Spirit is eclipsed-a Power
Hath pass'd from day to darkness — to
whose hour

MONODY ON THE DEATH OF R. B. SHERIDAN

Of light no likeness is bequeath'd -no

name,

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That what to them seem'd Vice might be but Woe.

Hard is his fate on whom the public gaze Is fix'd for ever to detract or praise; Repose denies her requiem to his name, And Folly loves the martyrdom of Fame. The secret enemy whose sleepless eye Stands sertinel, accuser, judge, and spy; 70 The foe, the fool, the jealous, and the vain, The envious who but breathe in others' pain

Behold the host! delighting to deprave, Who track the steps of Glory to the grave, Watch every fault that daring Genius owes Half to the ardour which its birth be

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To find in Hope but the renew'd caress,
The serpent-fold of further Faithlessness:-
If such may be the Ills which men as-
sail,

What marvel if at last the mightiest fail? Breasts to whom all the strength of feeling given

Bear hearts electric

from Heaven,

charged with fire

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Black with the rude collision, inly torn, By clouds surrounded, and on whirlwinds borne,

Driven o'er the lowering atmosphere that

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Which, in the Arabic language, is to the following purport.

The effect of the original ballad - which existed both in Spanish and Arabic-was such, that it was forbidden to be sung by the Moors, on pain of death, within Granada. [The Spanish of this ballad, which was originally printed side by side with the translation, is not known to exist elsewhere in its integrity. According to Mr. E. H. Coleridge it is 'a cento of three or more ballads which are included in the Guerras Civiles de Granada of Gines Perez de Hita, published at Saragossa in 1595.']

THE Moorish King rides up and down
Through Granada's royal town;
From Elvira's gates to those
Of Bivarambla on he goes.

Woe is me, Alhama!

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'Friends! ye have, alas! to know
Of a most disastrous blow,
That the Christians, stern and bold,
Have obtain'd Alhama's hold.'
Woe is me, Alhama!

Out then spake old Alfaqui, With his beard so white to see: 'Good King! thou art justly served, Good King! this thou hast deserved. Woe is me, Alhama!

'By thee were slain, in evil hour,
The Abencerrage, Granada's flower;
And strangers were received by thee,
Of Cordova the Chivalry.

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Woe is me, Alhama! 50

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