CAMPBELL.

TO WINTER.

Written at Ratisbon in the winter of 1800, just before the battle of Hohenlinden.

W

HEN first the fiery-mantled sun

His heavenly race began to run,

Round the earth and ocean blue

His children four the Seasons flew :-
First in green apparel dancing,

The young Spring smiled with angel grace;

Rosy Summer, next advancing,

Rushed into her sire's embrace :

Her bright-haired sire, who bade her keep

For ever nearest to his smiles,

On Calpe's olive-shaded steep,

On India's citron-covered isles;

More remote and buxom brown,

The Queen of vintage bowed before his throne; A rich pomegranate gemmed her crown

A ripe sheaf bound her zone.

But howling Winter fled afar
To hills that prop the polar star;
And loves on deer-borne car to ride,
With barren darkness by his side,
Round the shore where loud Lofoden

Whirls to death the roaring whale,
Round the hall where Runic Odin

Howls his war-song to the gale— Save when adown the ravaged globe He travels on his native storm, Deflowering Nature's grassy robe

And trampling on her faded form;

Till light's returning lord assume

The shaft that drives him to his polar field,

Of power to pierce his raven plume,
And crystal-covered shield.

Oh sire of storms! whose savage ear
The Lapland drum delights to hear,—
When Frenzy with her bloodshot eye
Implores thy dreadful deity,
Archangel power of desolation!

(Fast descending as thou art) Say, hath mortal invocation

Spells to touch thy stony heart? Then sullen Winter! hear my prayer,

And gently rule the ruined year

Nor chill the wanderer's bosom bare,
Nor freeze the wretch's falling tear;
To shivering want's unmantled bed

Thy horror-breathing agues cease to lend,
And mildly on the orphan head

Of Innocence descend.

But chiefly spare, O king of clouds !

The sailor on his airy shrouds,

When wrecks and beacons strew the steep,

And spectres walk along the deep;

Milder yet thy snowy breezes

Pour on yonder tented shores

Where the Rhine's broad billow freezes
Or the dark brown Danube roars.

Oh winds of winter! list ye there

To many a deep and dying groan?

Or start ye demons of the midnight air,

At shrieks and thunders louder than your own?

Alas! even your unhallowed breath

May spare the victim fallen low,

But man will ask no truce to death,
No bounds to human woe.

N

BYRON.

ON VENICE.

Composed at Venice in 1818, and appended to " Mazeppa" in the thin volume of 1819.

I.

O

H Venice! Venice! when thy marble walls
Are level with the waters, there shall be

A cry of nations o'er thy sunken halls,

A loud lament along the sweeping sea!
If I, a northern wanderer, weep for thee,
What should thy sons do?-anything but weep:
And yet they only murmur in their sleep.
In contrast with their fathers—as the slime,
The dull green ooze of the receding deep,
Is with the dashing of the spring-tide foam
That drives the sailor shipless to his home,
Are they to those that were; and thus they creep,
Crouching and crab-like, through their sapping streets.
Oh! agony-that centuries should reap

No mellower harvest! Thirteen hundred years
Of wealth and glory turn'd to dust and tears,
And every monument the stranger meets,
Church, palace, pillar, as a mourner greets;

And even the Lion all subdued appears,

And the harsh sound of the barbarian drum,
With dull and daily dissonance, repeats
The echo of thy tyrant's voice along

The soft waves, once all musical to song,

That heaved beneath the moonlight with the throng

Of gondolas-and to the busy hum

Of cheerful creatures, whose most sinful deeds

Were but the overbeating of the heart,

And flow of too much happiness, which needs
The aid of age to turn its course apart
From the luxuriant and voluptuous flood
Of sweet sensations, battling with the blood.
But these are better than the gloomy errors,
The weeds of nations in their last decay,

When Vice walks forth with her unsoften'd terrors,
And Mirth is madness, and but smiles to slay;
And Hope is nothing but a false delay,
The sick man's lightning half an hour ere death,
When Faintness, the last mortal birth of Pain,
And apathy of limb, the dull beginning

Of the cold staggering race which Death is winning,
Steals vein by vein and pulse by pulse away;
Yet so relieving the o'er-tortured clay,
To him appears renewal of his breath,

And freedom the mere numbness of his chain;
And then he talks of life, and how again