6.

True, separations"
Ask more than patience;
What desperations

From such have risen!
But yet remaining,
What is't but chaining

Hearts which, once waning,
Beat 'gainst their prison?
Time can but cloy love,
And use destroy love:
The wingéd boy, Love,
Is but for boys-
You'll find it torture

Though sharper, shorter,

To wean, and not wear out your joys.

December 1, 1819.

[First published, New Monthly Magazine, 1832,

vol. xxxv. pp. 310-312.]

ODE TO A LADY WHOSE LOVER WAS KILLED BY A BALL, WHICH AT THE SAME TIME SHIVERED A PORTRAIT NEXT HIS HEART.

MOTTO.

On peut trouver des femmes qui n'ont jamais eu de galanterie, mais il est rare d'en trouver qui n'en aient jamais eu qu'une.-[Réflexions. du Duc de la Rochefoucauld, No. lxxiii.]

I.

LADY! in whose heroic port

And Beauty, Victor even of Time,
And haughty lineaments, appear
Much that is awful, more that's dear-
Wherever human hearts resort

There must have been for thee a Court,
And Thou by acclamation Queen,
Where never Sovereign yet had been.

i. True separations.-[MS. G.]

That eye so soft, and yet severe,

Perchance might look on Love as Crime;
And yet regarding thee more near-
The traces of an unshed tear

Compressed back to the heart,
And mellowed Sadness in thine air,

Which shows that Love hath once been there,
To those who watch thee will disclose
More than ten thousand tomes of woes
Wrung from the vain Romancer's art.
With thee how proudly Love hath dwelt !
His full Divinity was felt,

Maddening the heart he could not melt,
Till Guilt became Sublime;

But never yet did Beauty's Zone
For him surround a lovelier throne,
Than in that bosom once his own:

And he the Sun and Thou the Clime
Together must have made a Heaven
For which the Future would be given.

2.

And thou hast loved-Oh! not in vain!
And not as common Mortals love.
The Fruit of Fire is Ashes,

The Ocean's tempest dashes

Wrecks and the dead upon the rocky shore:
True Passion must the all-searching changes prove,
The Agony of Pleasure and of Pain,

Till Nothing but the Bitterness remain ;

And the Heart's Spectre flitting through the brain Scoffs at the Exorcism which would remove.

3.

And where is He thou lovedst? in the tomb,
Where should the happy Lover be!

For him could Time unfold a brighter doom,
Or offer aught like thee?

He in the thickest battle died,

Where Death is Pride;

And Thou his widow-not his bride,
Wer't not more free—

Here where all love, till Love is made
A bondage or a trade,

Here-thou so redolent of Beauty,

In whom Caprice had seemed a duty,
Thou, who could'st trample and despise
The holiest chain of human ties
For him, the dear One in thine eyes,
Broke it no more.

Thy heart was withered to it's Core,
It's hopes, it's fears, it's feelings o'er:
Thy Blood grew Ice when his was shed,
And Thou the Vestal of the Dead.

Thy Lover died, as All

4.

Who truly love should die;

For such are worthy in the fight to fall
Triumphantly.

No Cuirass o'er that glowing heart
The deadly bullet turned apart:
Love had bestowed a richer Mail,
Like Thetis on her Son;

But hers at last was vain, and thine could fail—
The hero's and the lover's race was run.
Thy worshipped portrait, thy sweet face,
Without that bosom kept it's place

As Thou within.

Oh! enviously destined Ball!
Shivering thine imaged charms and all

Those Charms would win :

Together pierced, the fatal Stroke hath gored
Votary and Shrine, the adoring and the adored.
That Heart's last throb was thine, that blood
Baptized thine Image in it's flood,

And gushing from the fount of Faith
O'erflowed with Passion even in Death,

Constant to thee as in it's hour

Of rapture in the secret bower.

Thou too hast kept thy plight full well,
As many a baffled Heart can tell.

[From an autograph MS. in the possession of Mr. Murray, now for the first time printed.]

THE IRISH AVATAR..

"And Ireland, like a bastinadoed elephant, kneeling to receive the paltry rider."-Life of Curran, ii. 336.]

I.

ERE the daughter of Brunswick is cold in her grave,2 And her ashes still float to their home o'er the tide,

i. The enclosed lines, as you will directly perceive, are written by the Rev. W. L. Bowles. Of course it is for him to deny them, if they are not.-[Letter to Moore, September 17, 1821, Letters, 1901, v. 364.]

1. [A few days before Byron enclosed these lines in a letter to Moore (September 17, 1821) he had written to Murray (September 12): "If ever I do return to England... I will write a poem to which English Bards, etc., shall be New Milk, in comparison. Your present literary world of mountebanks stands in need of such an Avatar. Hence the somewhat ambiguous title. The word "Avatar" is not only applied ironically to George IV. as the "Messiah of Royalty," but metaphorically to the poem, which would descend in the " Capacity of Preserver" (see Sir W. Jones, Asiatic Research, i. 234).

The " 'fury" which sent Byron into this "lawless conscription of rhythmus," was inspired partly by an ungenerous attack on Moore, which appeared in the pages of John Bull ("Thomas Moore is not likely to fall in the way of knighthood. . . being public defaulter in his office to a large amount. . [August 5] It is true that we cannot from principle esteem the writer of the Twopenny Postbag. . . . It is equally true that we shrink from the profligacy," etc., August 12, 1821); and, partly, by the servility of the Irish, who had welcomed George IV. with an outburst of enthusiastic loyalty, when he entered Dublin in triumph within ten days of the death of Queen Caroline. The Morning Chronicle, August 8-August 18, 1821, prints effusive leading articles, edged with black borders, on the Queen's illness, death, funeral procession, etc., over against a column (in small type) headed "The King in Dublin." Byron's satire is a running comment on the pages of the Morning Chronicle. Moore was in Paris at the time, being, as John Bull said, "obliged to live out of England," and Byron gave him directions that twenty copies of the Irish Avatar "should be carefully and privately printed off" (see Bibliography, vol. vii. p. 260). In the first and second editions of his Conversations, Medwin, doubtless for prudential reasons, omitted twelve of the more libellous stanzas,

Lo! George the triumphant speeds over the wave, To the long-cherished Isle which he loved like hisbride.

2.

True, the great of her bright and brief Era are gone, The rain-bow-like Epoch where Freedom could pause For the few little years, out of centuries won,

Which betrayed not, or crushed not, or wept not her

cause.

3.

True, the chains of the Catholic clank o'er his rags,
The Castle still stands, and the Senate's no more,
And the Famine which dwelt on her freedomless crags
Is extending its steps to her desolate shore.

4.

To her desolate shore-where the emigrant stands
For a moment to gaze ere he flies from his hearth;
Tears fall on his chain, though it drops from his hands,
For the dungeon he quits is the place of his birth.

5.

But he comes! the Messiah of Royalty comes!
Like a goodly Leviathan rolled from the waves;
Then receive him as best such an advent becomes, i
With a legion of cooks, and an army of slaves!

i. such a hero becomes.—[MS. M.]

but afterwards, in "another edition," published in 1824, reinstated them. Murray did not publish the Irish Avatar in any collected edition till 1831. According to Crabb Robinson (Diary, 1869, ii. 437), Goethe said that "Byron's verses on George IV. (Query? The Irish Avatar) were the sublime of hatred."]

2. [The Queen died on the night (10.20 p.m.) of Tuesday, August 7. The King entered Dublin in state Friday, August 17. The vessel bearing the Queen's remains sailed from Harwich on the morning of Saturday, August 18, 1821.]

3. Seven covered waggons arrived at the Castle (August 3). They were laden with plate. . . Upwards of forty men cooks will be employed."-Morning Chronicle, August 8.]