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CIV.

'Twas not for fiction chose Rousseau this spot,
Peopling it with affections; but he found
It was the scene which passion must allot
To the miud's purified beings; 'twas the ground
Where early Love his Psyche's zone unbound,
And hallow'd it with loveliness: 'tis lone,
And wonderful, and deep, and hath a sound,
And sense, and sight of sweetness: here the Rhone

CX.

Italia! too, Italia! looking on thee,
Full flashes on the soul the light of ages,
Since the fierce Carthaginian almost won thee,
To the last halo of the chiefs and sages,
Who glorify thy consecrated pages:
Thou wert the throne and grave of empires; still
The fount at which the panting mind assuages
Her thirst of knowledge, quaffing there her fill,

Hath spread himself a couch, the Alps have rear'd | Flows from the eternal source of Rome's imperial

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They were gigantic minds, and their steep aim Was, Titan-like, on daring doubts to pile [flame Thoughts which should call down thunder, and the Of heaven, again assail'd, if heaven the while

hill.

CXI.

Thus far have I proceeded in a theme
Renew'd with no kind auspices; to feel
We are not what we have been, and to deem
We are not what we should be,-and to steel
The heart against itself; and to conceal
With a proud caution, love, or hate, or aught,-
Passion or feeling, purpose, grief, or zeal,-
Which is the tyrant spirit of our thought,

On man and man's research could deign do more Is a stern task of soul:-No matter,-it is taught.

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CXVI.

To aid thy mind's development-to watch
Thy dawn of little joys to sit and see
Almost thy very growth,-to view thee catch
Knowledge of objects,-wonders yet to thee!
To hold thee lightly on a gentle knee,
And print on thy soft cheek a parent's kiss,-
This, it should seem, was not reserved for me;
Yet this was in my nature:-as it is,

I know not what is there, yet something like to this.

CXVII.

In so doing, I recur from fiction to truth, and in dedicating to you in its complete, or at least concluded state, a poetical work which is the longest, the most thoughtful and comprehensive of my compositions, I wish to do honor to myself by the record of many years' intimacy with a man of learning, of talent, of steadiness, and of honor. It is not for minds like ours to give or to receive flattery; yet the praises of sincerity have ever been permitted to the voice of friendship; and it is not for you, nor

even for others, but to relieve a heart which has not elsewhere, or lately, been so much accustomed to the encounter of good-will as to withstand the Yet, though dull hate as duty should be taught, shock firmly, that I thus attempt to commemorate I know that thou wilt love me; though my name your good qualities, or rather the advantages which Should be shut from thee, as a spell still fraught I have derived from their exertion. Even the recurWith desolation,—and a broken claim; [same— rence of the date of this letter, the anniversary of Though the grave closed between us, 'twere the the most unfortunate day of my past existence, but I know that thou wilt love me; though to drain which cannot poison my future, while I retain the My blood from out thy being, were an aim, resource of your friendship, and of my own faculAnd an attainment,-all would be in vain,ties, will henceforth have a more agreeable recollecStill thou would'st love me, still that more than life tion for both, inasmuch as it will remind us of this my attempt to thank you for an indefatigable regard, such as few men have experienced, and no one could experience, without thinking better of his species and of himself.

retain.

CXVIII.

The child of love,-though born in bitterness,
And nurtured in convulsion. Of thy sire
These were the elements,-and thine no less.
As yet such are around thee,-but thy fire
Shall bo more temper'd, and thy hope far higher.
Sweet be thy cradled slumbers! O'er the sea,
And from the mountains where I now respire,
Fain would I waft such blessing upon thee,
As, with a sigh, I deem thou might'st have been to have accompanied me from first to. last; and per
me!

CANTO IV.

Visto ho Toscana, Lombardia, Romagna,
Quel Monte che divide, e quel che serra
Italia, e un mare e l'altro, che la bagna.
Ariosto, Satira iii.

Venice, January 2, 1818.

TO

JOHN HOBHOUSE, ESQ., A.M. F.R.S. &c., &c., &c.

MY DEAR HOBHOUSE,

It has been our fortune to traverse together, at various periods, the countries of chivalry, history, and fable-Spain, Greece, Asia Minor, and Italy: and what Athens and Constantinople were to us a few years ago, Venice and Rome have been more recently. The poem also, or the pilgrim, or both,

haps it may be a pardonable vanity which induces me to reflect with complacency on a composition which in some degree connects me with the spot where it was produced, and the object, it would fain describe; and however unworthy it may be deemed of those magical and memorable abodes, however short it may fall of our distant conceptions and im mediate impressions, yet, as a mark of respect for what is venerable, and of feeling for what is glori ous, it has been to me a source of pleasure in the production, and I part with it with a kind of regret, which I hardly suspected that events could have left me for imaginary objects.

With regard to the conduct of the last canto, there will be found less of the pilgrim than in any of the preceding, and that little slightly, if at all, separated from the author speaking in his own person. The fact is, that I had become weary of drawing a line which every one seemed determined not AFTER an interval of eight years between the to perceive: like the Chinese in Goldsmith's "Citcomposition of the first and last cantos of Childe izen of the World," whom nobody would believe to Harold, the conclusion of the poem is about to be be a Chinese, it was in vain that I asserted, and imsubmitted to the public. In parting with so old a agined that I had drawn, a distinction between the friend, it is not extraordinary that I should recur to author and the pilgrim; and the very anxiety to one still older and better,-to one who has beheld preserve this difference, and disappointment at findthe birth and death of the other, and to whom I am iug it unavailing, so far crushed my efforts in the far more indebted for the social advantages of an composition, that I determined to abandon it altoenlightened friendship, than-though not ungrate-gether-and have done so. The opinions which ful-I can or could be, to Childe Harold for any have been, or may be, formed on that subject, are public favor reflected through the poem on the poet, now a matter of indifference; the work is to depend -to one, whom I have known long, and accompa- on itself, and not on the writer; and the author, nied far; whom I have found wakeful over my sick-who has no resources in his own mind beyond the ness, and kind in my sorrow; glad in my prosperity, reputation, transient or permanent, which is to and firm in my adversity; true in counsel, and trusty arise from his literary efforts, deserves the fate of in peril,-to a friend often tried and never found authors. Wanting;-to yourself.

In the course of the following canto, it was my

intention, either in the text or in the notes, to have something more than a permanent army and a sus touched upon the present state of Italian literature, pended Habeas Corpus; it is enough for them to and perhaps of manners. But the text, within the look at home. For what they have done abroad, limits I proposed, I soon found hardly sufficient for and especially in the South, "Verily they will have the labyrinth of external objects and the conse- their reward," and at no very distant period. quent reflections; and for the whole of the notes, excepting a few of the shortest, I am indebted to yourself, and these were necessarily limited to the elucidation of the text.

It is also a delicate, and no very grateful task, to dissert upon the literature and manners of a nation so dissimilar; and requires an attention and impartiality which would induce us,-though perhaps no inattentive observers, nor ignorant of the language or customs of the people amongst whom we have recently abode,-to distrust, or at least defer our judgment, and more narrowly examine our information. The state of literary, as well as political party, appears to run, or to have run, so high, that for a stranger to steer impartially between them is next to impossible. It may be enough then, at least for my purpose, to quote from their own beautiful language-"Mi pare che in un paese tutto poetico, che vanta la lingua la più nobile ed insieme la più dolce, tutte tutte le vie diversi si possono tentare, e che sinche la patria di Alfieri e di Monti non ha perduto l'antico valore, in tutte essa dovrebbe essere la prima." Italy has great names stillCanova, Monti, Ugo Foscolo, Pindemonte, Visconti, Morelli, Cicognara, Albrizzi, Mezzophanti, Mai,| Mustoxidi, Agiletti, and Vacca, will secure to the present generation an honorable place in most of the departments of Art, Science, and Belles Lettres; and in some of the very highest;-Europethe World-has but one Canova.

Wishing you, my dear Hobhouse, a safe and agreeable return to that country whose real welfare can be dearer to none than to yourself, I dedicate to you this poem in its completed state; and repeat once more how truly I am ever

Your obliged and affectionate friend,
BYRON.

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 winged 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 2
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 ali gems in sparkling showers.
In purple was she robed, and of her feast
Monarchs partook, and deem'd their dignity in-
creased.

III.

In Venice, Tasso's echoes are no more,3
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.

It has been somewhere said by Alfieri, that "La pianta uomo nasce più robusta in Italia che in qualunque altra terra-e che gli stessi atroci delitti che vi si commettono ne sono una prova." Without subscribing to the latter part of his proposition, a dangerous doctrine, the truth of which may be disputed on better grounds, namely, that the Italians are in no respect more ferocious than their neighbors, that man must be wilfully blind, or ignorantly heedless, who is not struck with the extraordinary capacity of this people, or, if such a word be admissible, their capabilities, the facility of their acquisitions, the rapidity of their conceptions, the fire of their genius, their sense of beauty, and amidst all the disadvantages of repeated revolutions, the desolation of battles, and the despair of ages, their still unquenched "longing after immortality,”— the immortality of independence. And when we ourselves, in riding round the walls of Rome, heard the simple lament of the laborers' chorus, "Roma! Roma! Roma! Roma non è più come era prima," it was difficult not to contrast this melancholy dirge For us repeopled were the solitary shore.

with the bacchanal roar of the songs of exultation still yelled from the London taverns, over the carnage of Mont St. Jean, and the betrayal of Genoa, of Italy, of France, and of the world, by men whose conduct you yourself have exposed in a work worthy of the better days of our history. For me,

"Non movero mat corda

Ore la turba di sue ciance assorda."

What Italy has gained by the late transfer of nations, it were useless for Englishmen to inquire, till it becomes ascertained that England has acquired

IV.

But unto us she hath a spell beyond
Her name in story, and her long array
Of mighty shadows, whose dim forms despond
Above the dogeless city's vanish'd sway;
Ours is a trophy which will not decay
With the Rialto; Shylock and the Moor,
And Pierra, cannot be swept or worn away-
The keystones of the arch! though all were o'er,

V.

The beings of the mind are not of clay;
Essentially immortal, they create
And multiply in us a brighter ray
And more beloved existence: that which fate
Prohibits to dull life, in this our state
Of mortal bondage, by these spirits supplied,
First exiles, then replaces what we hate;
Watering the heart whose early flowers have died,
And with a fresher growth replenishing the void.

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Of hasty growth and blight, and dull Oblivion bar Have flung a desolate cloud o'er Venice' lovely

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When Venice was a queen with an unequall'd dower. Of Venice think of thine, despite thy watery wall

XVIII.

I loved her from my boyhood-she to me
Was as a fairy city of the heart,

Rising like water-columns from the sea,
Of joy the sojourn, and of wealth the mart;
And Otway, Radcliffe, Schiller, Shakspeare's art, 12
Had stamp'd her image in me, and even so,
Although I found her thus, we did not part,
Perchance even dearer in her day of wo,

XXIV.

And how and why we know not, nor can trace
Home to its cloud this lightning of the mind,
But feel the shock renew'd, nor can efface
The blight and blackening which it leaves behind,
Which out of things familiar, undesign'd,
When least we deem of such, calls up to view
The spectres whom no exorcism can bind, [anew,
The cold-the changed-perchance the dead-

Than when she was a boast, a marvel, and a show. The mourn'd, the loved, the lost-too many!-yet

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Striking the electric chain wherewith we are darkly The last still loveliest, till-'tis gone and all is

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