CLXXV. But I forget. - My Pilgrim's shrine is won, His task and mine alike are nearly done; Those waves, we follow'd on till the dark Euxine roll'd CLXXVI. Upon the blue Symplegades: long years Long, though not very many, since have done Their work on both; some suffering and some tears Have left us nearly where we had begun : Yet not in vain our mortal race hath run, We have had our reward and it is here; That we can yet feel gladden'd by the sun, And reap from earth, sea, joy almost as dear As if there were no man to trouble what is clear. CLXXVII. Oh! that the Desert were my dwelling-place, With one fair Spirit for my minister, That I might all forget the human race, I feel myself exalted-Can ye not Accord me such a being? Do I err In deeming such inhabit many a spot? Though with them to converse can rarely be our lot. CLXXVIII. There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep Sea, and music in its roar : I love not Man the less, but Nature more, From these our interviews, in which I steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the Universe, and feel What I can ne'er express, yet can not all conceal. CLXXIX. Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean - roll! Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain; Man marks the earth with ruin-his control Stops with the shore; upon the watery plain The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain A shadow of man's ravage, save his own, When, for a moment, like a drop of rain, He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan, Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown. CLXXX. His steps are not upon thy paths,— thy fields And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields For earth's destruction thou dost all despise, Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies, And send'st him, shivering in thy playful spray And howling, to his Gods, where haply lies His petty hope in some near port or bay, And dashest him again to earth: · - there let him lay. CLXXXI. The armaments which thunderstrike the walls Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake, And monarchs tremble in their capitals, The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make Their clay creator the vain title take Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war; These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake, They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar Alike the Armada's pride, or spoils of Trafalgar. CLXXXII. Thy shores are empires, changed in all save theeAssyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they? (1) Thy waters wasted them while they were free, And many a tyrant since; their shores obey The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay Has dried up realms to deserts: - not so thou, Unchangeable save to thy wild waves' play Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now. (1) [When Lord Byron wrote this stanza, he had, no doubt, the following passage in Boswell's Johnson floating on his mind :-" Dining one day with General Paoli, and talking of his projected journey to Italy,- ́A man,' said Johnson, who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see. The grand object of all travelling is to see the shores of the Mediterranean. On those shores were the four great empires of the world; the Assyrian, the Persian, the Grecian, and the Roman. All our religion, almost all our law, almost all our arts, almost all that sets us above savages, has come to us from the shores of the Mediterranean.' The General observed, that The Mediterranean' would be a noble subject for a poem."- Croker's Boswell, vol. iii. p. 400.-E.] CLXXXIII. Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form Calm or convulsed in breeze, or gale, or storm, Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime CLXXXIV. And I have loved thee, Ocean! (1) and my joy Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be Borne, like thy bubbles, onward: from a boy I wanton'd with thy breakers- they to me Were a delight; and if the freshening sea Made them a terror 'twas a pleasing fear, For I was as it were a child of thee, And trusted to thy billows far and near, And laid my hand upon thy mane as I do here. (1) [This passage, would, perhaps, be read without emotion, if we did not know that Lord Byron was here describing his actual feelings and habits, and that this was an unaffected picture of his propensities and amusements even from childhood,-when he listened to the roar, and watched the bursts of the northern ocean on the tempestuous shores of Aberdeen. shire. It was a fearful and violent change at the age of ten years to be separated from this congenial solitude, -this independence so suited to his haughty and contemplative spirit, this rude grandeur of nature, and thrown among the mere worldly-minded and selfish ferocity, the affected polish and repelling coxcombry, of a great public school. How thoumany sand times did the moody, sullen, and indignant boy wish himself back to the keen air and boisterous billows that broke lonely upon the simple and soul-invigorating haunts of his childhood, How did he prefer some ghost. story; some tale of second-sight; some relation of Robin Hood's feats; CLXXXV. My task is done (1) — my song hath ceased theme Has died into an echo; it is fit The spell should break of this protracted dream. Which in my spirit dwelt is fluttering, faint, and low. some harrowing narrative of buccaneer-exploits, to all of Horace, and Virgil, and Homer, that was dinned into his repulsive spirit! To the shock of this change is, I suspect, to be traced much of the eccentricity of Lord Byron's future life. This fourth Canto is the fruit of a mind which had stored itself with great care and toil, and had digested with profound reflection and intense vigour what it had learned the sentiments are not such as lie on the surface, but could only be awakened by long meditation. Whoever reads it, and is not impressed with the many grand virtues as well as gigantic powers of the mind that wrote it, seems to me to afford a proof both of insensibility of heart, and great stupidity of intellect." — SIR E BRYDGES.] (1) [It was a thought worthy of the great spirit of Byron, after exhibiting to us his Pilgrim amidst all the most striking scenes of earthly grandeur and earthly decay, -after teaching us, like him, to sicken over the muta. bility, and vanity, and emptiness of human greatness, to conduct him and us at last to the borders of " the Great Deep." It is there that we may perceive an image of the awful and unchangeable abyss of eternity, into whose bosom so much has sunk, and all shall one day sink,- of that eternity wherein the scorn and the contempt of man, and the melancholy of great, and the fretting of little minds, shall be at rest for ever. No one, but a true poet of man and of nature, would have dared to frame such a termination for such a Pilgrimage. The image of the wanderer may well be associated, for a time, with the rock of Calpe, the shattered temples of Athens, or the gigantic fragments of Rome; but when we wish to think of this dark personification as of a thing which is, where can we so well imagine him to have his daily haunt as by the roaring of the waves? It was thus that Homer represented Achilles in his moments of ungovernable |