CIV. Some kinder casuists are pleased to say, In nameless print—that I have no devotion; My altars are the mountains and the Ocean, CV. Sweet Hour of Twilight !-in the solitude CVI. The shrill cicalas, people of the pine, Making their summer lives one ceaseless song, i. Are not these pretty stanzas ?—some folks say- 1. [Compare Coleridge's Lines to Nature, which were published in the Morning Herald, in 1815, but must have been unknown to Byron"So will I build my altar in the fields, And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be."] 2. ["As early as the fifth or sixth century of the Christian era, the port of Augustus was converted into pleasant orchards, and a lovely grove of pines covered the ground where the Roman fleet once rode at anchor. . . . This advantageous situation was fortified by art and labour, and in the twentieth year of his age, the Emperor of the West the walls and morasses of Ravenna."-Gibbon's Decline and Fall, 1825, ii. 244, 245.] retired to.. 3. [The first time I had a conversation with Lord Byron on the subject of religion was at Ravenna, my native country, in 1820, while we were riding on horseback in an extensive solitary wood of pines. The scene invited to religious meditation. It was a fine day in spring. 'How,' he said, 'raising our eyes to heaven, or directing them to the earth, can we doubt of the existence of God?-or how, turning them to what is within us, can we doubt that there is something more noble and durable than the clay of which we are formed?'"-Count Gamba.] Were the sole echoes, save my steed's and mine, His hell-dogs, and their chase, and the fair throng CVII. Oh, Hesperus! thou bringest all good things-2 Whate'er our household gods protect of dear, " 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, 2. And made a merit of her cruelty, Mine is the ungrateful maid by heaven design'd: "By her example warn'd, the rest beware; More easy, less imperious, were the fair; And that one hunting, which the Devil design'd 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 ̓ αὐως 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; 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 CIX. When Nero perished by the justest doom Of nations freed, and the world overjoyed, CX. But I'm digressing; what on earth has Nero, To do with the transactions of my hero, 2 More than such madmen's fellow man-the moon's? I. 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 trimmed 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 And then as an improvement 't will be shown: 1. [See De Poeticâ, cap. xxiv. See, too, the Preface to Dryden's "Dedication" of the Aneis (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 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, Man, and, as we would hope,-perhaps the Devil, While Youth's hot wishes in our red veins revel, I. 2. ["Till Pride and worse Ambition threw me down, ["Time hovers o'er, impatient to destroy, In vain their gifts the bounteous seasons pour, With listless eyes the dotard views the store, He views, and wonders that they please no more." Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes.] |