"O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been
Alone on a wide, wide sea:

So lonely 'twas, that God himself
Scarce seemed there to be.

"O sweeter than the marriage feast,

'Tis sweeter far to me,

With a goodly company!

600

To walk together to the kirk

"To walk together to the kirk,

605

And all together pray,

While each to his great Father bends,

Old men, and babes, and loving friends,
And youths and maidens gay!

BYRON.

[MODERN GREECE.]

CHILDE HAROLD, CANTO II

LXXXV.

AND yet how lovely in thine age of woe,
Land of lost gods and godlike men - art thou!
Thy vales of evergreen, thy hills of snow,
Proclaim thee Nature's varied favourite now;
Thy fanes, thy temples to thy surface bow,
Commingling slowly with heroic earth,
Broke by the share of every rustic plough:
So perish monuments of mortal birth,

So perish all in turn, save well-recorded Worth;

LXXXVI.

Save where some solitary column.mourns
Above its prostrate brethren of the cave;
Save where Tritonia's airy shrine adorns
Colonna's cliff, and gleams along the wave;
Save o'er some warrior's half-forgotten grave,
Where the gray stones and unmolested grass
Ages, but not oblivion, feebly brave,

While strangers only not regardless pass,

Lingering like me, perchance, to gaze, and sigh "Alas!"

LXXXVII.

Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild :
Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy fields,
Thine olive ripe as when Minerva smiled,
And still his honey'd wealth Hymettus yields;

5

10

15

20

There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds,
The freeborn wanderer of thy mountain-air;
Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds,
Still in his beam Mendeli's marbles glare;

Art, Glory, Freedom fail, but Nature still is fair.

25

LXXXVIII.

Where'er we tread 'tis haunted, holy ground;
No earth of thine is lost in vulgar mould,
But one vast realm of wonder spreads around,
And all the Muse's tales seem truly told,
Till the sense aches with gazing to behold
The scenes our earliest dreams have dwelt upon :
Each hill and dale, each deepening glen and wold
Defies the power which crush'd thy temples gone:
Age shakes Athena's tower, but spares gray Marathon.

LXXXIX.

The sun, the soil, but not the slave, the same;
Unchanged in all except its foreign lord,

30

35

Preserves alike its bounds and boundless fame

The Battle-field, where Persia's victim horde

40

First bow'd beneath the brunt of Hellas' sword,

As on the morn to distant Glory dear,

When Marathon became a magic word;

Which utter'd, to the hearer's eye appear

The camp, the host, the fight, the conqueror's career,

45

XC.

The flying Mede, his shaftless broken bow;
The fiery Greek, his red pursuing spear;

Mountains above, Earth's, Ocean's plain below;
Death in the front, Destruction in the rear!

Such was the scene

what now remaineth here?

What sacred trophy marks the hallow'd ground,
Recording Freedom's smile and Asia's tear?

The rifled urn, the violated mound,

The dust thy courser's hoof, rude stranger! spurns around

50

XCI.

Yet to the remnants of thy splendor past
Shall pilgrims, pensive, but unwearied, throng;
Long shall the voyager, with th' Ionian blast,
Hail the bright clime of battle and of song;
Long shall thine annals and immortal tongue
Fill with thy fame the youth of many a shore:
Boast of the aged! lesson of the young!
Which sages venerate and bards adore,

As Pallas and the Muse unveil their awful lore.

55

60

But he whom Sadness sootheth may abide,

And scarce regret the region of his birth,

When wandering slow by Delphi's sacred side,

Or gazing o'er the plains where Greek and Persian died.

XCIII.

Let such approach this consecrated land,

70

And pass in peace along the magic waste:

But spare its relics - let no busy hand

75

Deface the scenes, already now defaced!

Not for such purpose were these altars placed.
Revere the remnants nations once revered:

So may our country's name be undisgraced,

So mayst thou prosper where thy youth was rear'd, By every honest joy of love and life endear'd!

80

[VENICE.]

CHILDE HAROLD, CANTO IV.

I.

I STOOD in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;
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:
A thousand years their cloudy wings expand
Around me, and a dying Glory smiles

O'er the far times when many a subject land
Look'd to the wingèd Lion's marble piles,

Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles!

II.

She looks a sea Cybele, 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
Pour'd in her lap all gems in sparkling showers.
In purple was she robed, and of her feast

15

Monarchs partook, and deem'd their dignity increased.

III.

In Venice Tasso's echoes are no more,
And silent rows the songless gondolier:
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,

The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy!

20

25