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 (In copying) this long canto into two; They'll never find it out, unless I own The fact, excepting some experienced few; And then as an improvement 't will be shown: I'll prove that such the opinion of the critic is From Aristotle passim.-See ПOIнTIKнΣ.1

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

In poesy, unless perhaps the end;

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,
And sharp Adversity, will teach at last

Man, and, as we would hope,-perhaps the Devil,
That neither of their intellects are vast:

While Youth's hot wishes in our red veins revel,
We know not this-the blood flows on too fast;
But as the torrent widens towards the Ocean,
We ponder deeply on each past emotion.2

I.

2.

["Till Pride and worse Ambition threw me down,
Warring in Heaven against Heaven's matchless King."
Paradise Lost, iv. 40, 41.]

["Time hovers o'er, impatient to destroy,
And shuts up all the passages of joy :

In vain their gifts the bounteous seasons pour,
The fruit autumnal, and the vernal flow'r;

With listless eyes the dotard views the store,

He views, and wonders that they please no more."

Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes.]

III.

As boy, I thought myself a clever fellow,

And wished 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

1

Leaf," 1 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,

'T is that I may not weep; and if I weep, 'T is that our nature cannot always bring

Itself to apathy, for we must steep

Our hearts first in the 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,
And trace it in this poem every line:

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 planned,
Unless it were 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
2 was sire of the half-serious rhyme,"
Who sang when Chivalry was more quixotic,

I.

iii.

i. Itself to that fit apathy whose deed. [MS.]
ii. First in the icy depths of Lethe's spring.-[MS.]

iii. Pulci being Father

--[MS. Alternative reading.]

["... my May of Life

Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf."

Macbeth, act v. sc. 3, lines 22, 23.]

2. [See "Introduction to the Morgante Maggiore," Poetical Works, 1901, iv. 280.]

And revelled in the fancies of the time,

True Knights, chaste Dames, huge Giants, Kings despotic;

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 have imputed such designs as show

Not what they saw, but what they wished to see:
But if it gives them pleasure, be it so;

This is a liberal age, and thoughts are free:
Meantime Apollo plucks me by the ear,
And tells me to resume my story here.1

VIII.

Young Juan and his lady-love were left

To their own hearts' most sweet society;
Even Time the pitiless in sorrow cleft

With his rude scythe such gentle bosoms; he
Sighed to behold them of their hours bereft,
Though foe to Love; and yet they could not be
Meant to grow old, but die in happy Spring,
Before one charm or hope had taken wing.

IX.

Their faces were not made for wrinkles, their

Pure blood to stagnate, their great hearts to fail;
The blank grey was not made to blast their hair,
But like the climes that know nor snow nor hail,
They were all summer; lightning might assail
And shiver them to ashes, but to trail

A long and snake-like life of dull decay
Was not for them-they had too little clay.

X.

They were alone once more; for them to be
Thus was another Eden; they were never
Weary, unless when separate: the tree
Cut from its forest root of years—the river

I.

["Cum canerem reges et prælia, Cynthius aurem
Vellit, et admonuit."
Virgil, Ecl. vi. lines 3, 4.
4.]

Dammed from its fountain-the child from the knee
And breast maternal weaned at once for ever,-
Would wither less than these two torn apart; i.
Alas! there is no instinct like the Heart—

XI.

The Heart-which may be broken: happy they!
Thrice fortunate! who of that fragile mould,
The precious porcelain of human clay,

Break with the first fall: they can ne'er behold
The long year linked with heavy day on day,
And all which must be borne, and never told;
While Life's strange principle will often lie
Deepest in those who long the most to die.

XII.

"Whom the gods love die young," was said of yore,1
And many deaths do they escape by this:

The death of friends, and that which slays even more-
The death of Friendship, Love, Youth, all that is,
Except mere breath; and since the silent shore
Awaits at last even those who longest miss
The old Archer's shafts, perhaps the early grave
Which men weep over may be meant to save.

XIII.

Haidée and Juan thought not of the dead

The Heavens, and Earth, and Air, seemed made for them :

i.

-from its mother's knee

When its last weaning draught is drained for ever,
The child divided-it were less to see,

Than these two from each other torn apart.—[MS.]

1. [See Herodotus (Cleobis and Biton), i. 31. The sentiment is in a fragment of Menander.

or

“Ον οἱ θεοὶ φιλοῦσιν ἀποθνήσκει νέος

“Ον γὰρ φιλεῖ θεὸς ἀποθνήσκει νέος.

vi. 57.]

Menandri et Philemonis reliquiæ, edidit Augustus Meineke, p. 48. See Letters, 1898, ii. 22, note 1. Byron applied the saying to Allegra in a letter to Sir Walter Scott, dated May 4, 1822, Letters, 1901, 2. [Compare Childe Harold, Canto II. stanza xcvi. line 7. Compare, too, Young's Night Thoughts ("The Complaint," Night I. ed. 1825, p. 5).]