LXXVII. Juan had on a shawl of black and gold, An emerald aigrette with Haidee's hair in't, Surmounted as its clasp-a glowing crescent, Whose rays shone ever trembling, but incessant. LXXVIII. And now they were diverted by their suite, And for his theme-he seldom sung below it, As the psalm says, "inditing a good matter." LXXIX. He praised the present and abused the past, Reversing the good custom of old days, An eastern anti-jacobin at last He turn'd, preferring pudding to no praiseFor some few years his lot had been o'ercast By his seeming independent in his lays, But now he sung the Sultan and the Pacha, With truth like Southey, and with verse Crashaw. LXXX. In France, for instance, he would write a chanson; In Spain, he'd make a ballad or romance on In Greece, he'd sing some sort of hymn like this t' ye The isles of Greece! the isles of Greece ! Where burning Sappho loved and sung, Where grew the arts of war and peace, Where Delos rose and Phoebus sprung' Eternal summer gilds them yet, But all, except their sun, is set The Scian and the Teian muse, The hero's harp, the lover's lute, Have found the fame your shores refuse Their place of birth alone is mute To sounds which echo further west Than your sires' "Islands of the Bless'd. ' The mountains look on Marathon- I dream'd that Greece might still be free; For, standing on the Persians' grave, I could not deem myself a slave. A king sate on the rocky brow And men in nations ;-all were his! And where are they! and where art thou. My country? On thy voiceless shore The heroic lay is tuneless now The heroic bosom beats no more! And must thy lyre, so long divine, Degenerate into hands like mine? XCIII. All are not moralists like Southey, when He prated to the world of "Pantisocracy;" Or Wordsworth unexcised, unhired, who then Season'd his pedlar poems with democracy; Or Coleridge, long before his flighty pen Let to the Morning Post its aristocracy; When he and Southey, following the same path, Espoused two partners, (milliners of Bath.) XCIV. Such names at present cut a convict figure, Are good manure for their more bare biography. XCV. He there builds up a formidable dyke Between his own and others' intellect; But Wordsworth's poem, and his followers, like Joanna Southcote's Shiloh and her sect, Are things which in this century don't strike The public mind, so few are the elect; And the new births of both their stale virginities Have proved but dropsies taken for divinities. XCVI. But let me to my story: I must own If I have any fault, it is digression; Leaving my people to proceed alone, While I soliloquize beyond expression; But these are my addresses from the throne, Which put off business to the ensuing session: Forgetting each omission is a loss to The world, not quite so great as Ariosto. XCVII. I know that what our neighbors call " longueurs," (We've not so good a word, but have the thing In that complete perfection, which ensures An epic from Bob Southey every spring)- XCVIII. We learn from Horace, Homer sometimes sleeps, Of Ocean-no, of air; and then he makes XCIX. If he must fain sweep o'er the ethereal plain. He fear'd his neck to venture such a nag on, And he must needs mount nearer to the moon, Could not the blockhead ask for a balloon? C. "Pedlars," and "boats," and "wagons!" Oh! ye Of Pope and Dryden, are we come to this? [shader That trash of such sort not alone evades Contempt, but from the bathos' vast abyss Floats scum-like uppermost, and these Jack Cades Of sense and song above your graves may hissThe "little boatman" and his "Peter Bell" Can sneer at him who drew " Achitophel!" CI. T' our tale.-The feast was over, the slaves gone. The dwarfs and dancing girls had all retired; The Arab lore and poet's song were done. And every sound of revelry expired; The lady and her lover, left alone, The rosy flood of twilight sky admired;Ave Maria! o'er the earth and sea, That heavenliest hour of Heaven is worthiest thee I CII. Ave Maria! blessed be the hour! The time, the clime, the spot, where I so oft Have felt that moment in its fullest power Sink o'er the earth so beautiful and soft, While swung the deep bell in the distant tower, Or the faint dying day-hymn stole aloft, And not a breath crept through the rosy air, And yet the forest leaves seem stirr'd with prayer CIII. Ave Maria! 'tis the hour of prayer! Ave Maria! 'tis the hour of love! Ave Maria! may our spirits dare Look up to thine and to thy Son's above! Ave Maria! oh that face so fair! Those downcast eyes beneath the almighty doveWhat though 'tis but a pictured image strikeThat painting is no idol, 'tis too like. CIV. Some kind casuists are pleased to say, In nameless print-that I have no devotion, But set those persons down with me to pray, And you shall see who has the properest notion Of getting into heaven the shortest way; My altars are the mountains and the ocean, Earth, air, stars,-all that springs from the great whole, Who hath produced, and will receive the soul CV. Sweet hour of twilight!-in the solitude Of the pine forest, and the silent shore Which bounds Ravenna's immemorial wood, Rooted where once the Adrian wave flow'd o'er, To where the last Cæsarean fortress stood, Ever-green forest! which Boccaccio's lore And Dryden's lay made haunted ground to me, How have I loved the twilight hour and thee' CVI. The shrill cicalas, people of the pine, Making their summer lives one ceaseless song, 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 learn'd from this example not to fly From a true lover, shadow'd my mind's eye. CVII. Soft hour which wakes the wish and melts the Seeming to weep the dying day's decay; Is this a fancy which our reason scorns? CIX. When Nero perish'd by the justest doom Of nations freed, and the world overjoy'd, CX. But I'm digressing: what on earth has Nero, Or any such like sovereign buffoons, II. But time, which brings all beings to their level, III. As boy, I thought myself a clever fellow, And wish'd 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, "Tis that I may not weep; and if I weep, 'Tis that our nature cannot always bring Itself to apathy, which we must steep First in the icy 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, To do with the transactions of my hero, [moon's? And trace it in this poem every line: More than such madmen's fellow-man-the Sure my invention must be down at zero, 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 plann'd, Unless it was to be a moment merry, A novel word in my vocabulary. VI. To the kind reader of our sober clime, This way of writing will appear exotic; Pulci was sire of the half-serious rhyme, Who sung when chivalry was more Quixotic, And revell'd in the fancies of the time, [despotic. True knights, chaste dames, huge giants, kings But all these, save the last, being obsolete. I chose a modern subject as more meet VII. How I have treated it, I do not know Perhaps no better than they have treated me Who nave imputed such designs as show, Not what they saw, but what they wish'd to see But if it gives them pleasure, be it so, This is a liberal age, and thoughts are free: VIII. Young Juan and his lady-love were left XVI. Moons changing had roll'd on, and changeless found By the mere senses; and that which destroys Oh beautiful! and rare as beautiful! But theirs was love in which the mind delights To lose itself, when the whole world grows dull, And we are sick of its hack sounds and sights, Intrigues, adventures of the common school, Its petty passions, marriages, and flights, Where Hymen's torch but brands one strumpet more Whose husband only knows her not a wh-re. XVIII. Hard words; harsh truth; a truth which many know Which perish in the rest, but in them were This is in others a factitious state, An opium dream of too much youth and reading, But was in them their nature or their fate; No novels e'er had set their young hearts bleeding, For Haidee's knowledge was by no means great, And Juan was a boy of saintly breeding, So that there was no reason for their loves, More than for those of nightingales or doves. XX. They gazed upon the sunset; 'tis an hour For it had made them what they were: the power Dear unto all, but dearest to their eyes, Of love had first o'erwhelm'd them from such When happiness had been their only dower, [skies, And twilight saw them link'd in passion's ties ; Charm'd with each other, all things charm'd that brought The past still welcome as the present thought. XXI. I know not why, but in that hour to-night, And thus some boding flash'd through either frame And call'd from Juan's breast a faint low sigh, While one new tear arose in Haidee's eye. XXII. That large black prophet eye seem'd to dilate And follow far the disappearing sun, As if their last day of a happy date, With his broad, bright, and dropping orb wen Juan gazed on her as to ask his fate- [gone He felt a grief, but knowing cause for none, His glance inquired of hers for some excuse For feelings causeless, or at least abstruse. |