1

CLXVIII

Scion of chiefs 1 and monarchs, where art thou?
Fond hope of many nations, art thou dead?
Could not the grave forget thee, and lay low
Some less majestic, less beloved head?

In the sad midnight, while thy heart still bled,
The mother of a moment, o'er thy boy,

Death hushed that pang for ever: with thee fled
The present happiness and promised joy

Which filled the imperial isles so full it seemed to cloy.

CLXIX

Peasants bring forth in safety.—Can it be,
Oh thou that wert so happy, so adored!
Those who weep not for kings shall weep for thee,
And freedom's heart, grown heavy, cease to hoard
Her many griefs for ONE! for she had poured
Her orisons for thee, and o'er thy head
Beheld her Iris.-Thou, too, lonely lord,
And desolate consort-vainly wert thou wed!
The husband of a year! the father of the dead!

CLXX

Of sackcloth was thy wedding garment made;
Thy bridal's fruit is ashes in the dust
The fair-haired Daughter of the Isles is laid,
The love of millions! How we did entrust
Futurity to her! and, though it must
Darken above our bones, yet fondly deemed

Our children should obey her child, and blessed

Her and her hoped-for seed, whose promise seemed Like stars to shepherd's eyes :-'twas but a meteor beamed.

CLXXI

Woe unto us, not her; for she sleeps well :
The fickle reek of popular breath, the tongue
Of hollow counsel, the false oracle,

Which from the birth of monarchy hath rung

1 Scion of chiefs.] Byron alludes to the death of the Princess Charlotte, the daughter of George IV., and wife of Leopold, subsequently King of the Belgians, She died in 1817,

Its knell in princely ears, till the o'erstung
Nations have armed in madness, the strange fate
Which tumbles mightiest sovereigns, and hath flung
Against their blind omnipotence a weight

Within the opposing scale, which crushes soon or late,— 1

CLXXII

These might have been her destiny; but no,
Our hearts deny it and so young, so fair,
Good without effort, great without a foe :
But now a bride and mother-and now there!
How many ties did that stern moment tear!
From thy Sire's to his humblest subject's breast
Is linked the electric chain of that despair,

1

Whose shock was as an earthquake's, and opprest The land which loved thee so that none could love thee best.

CLXXIII

Lo, Nemi! navelled in the woody hills

So far, that the uprooting wind which tears
The oak from his foundation, and which spills
The ocean o'er its boundary, and bears

Its foam against the skies, reluctant spares
The oval mirror of thy glassy lake

;

And calm as cherished hate, its surface wears

A deep cold settled aspect nought can shake,
All coiled into itself and round, as sleeps the snake.

CLXXIV

And near, Albano's scarce divided waves
Shine from a sister valley ;-and afar
The Tiber winds, and the broad ocean laves
The Latian coast where sprung the Epic war,
'Arms and the man,' whose re-ascending star
Rose o'er an empire :-but beneath thy right

4

1 His sympathy with the Princess does not cause him to abandon the anti-monarchical sentiments by which he was so strongly imbued.

2 Nemi.] A little village near the Arician retreat of Egeria, and within a ride of Albano.

3 Navelled.] From the Greek oμpadòs.

4 The Epic war.] The great Epic poem of Virgil, who sang of Eneas, whose reputed descendants became emperors.

M

Tully reposed1 from Rome ;—and where yon bar

Of girdling mountains intercepts the sight

The Sabine farm was tilled, the weary bard's' delight.

CLXXV

But I forget.-My Pilgrim's shrine is won,
And he and I must part,-so let it be,—
His task and mine alike are nearly done;
Yet once more let us look upon the sea;
The midland ocean 2 breaks on him and me,
And from the Alban Mount we now behold

Our friend of youth, that Ocean, which when we
Beheld it last by Calpe's rock unfold

Those waves, we followed on till the dark Euxine rolled

CLXXVI

3

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 gladdened 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,
And, hating no one, love but only her!
Ye elements!-in whose ennobling stir
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.

1 Tully reposed.] Cicero reposed at his Tusculan villa, the scene of the Tusculan disputations, and Horace was the weary bard whose Sabine farm is so frequently alluded to by himself.

2 The midland ocean.] A translation of the word Mediterranean. 3 Symplegades.] A cluster of islands near the Bosphorus, spoken of by Eschylus and Juvenal, who translates the name Concurrentia Saxa.

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, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.1

CLXXX

His steps are not upon thy paths,-thy fields
Are not a spoil for him,-thou dost arise

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 sendest 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,2

CLXXXI

The armaments which thunderstrike the walls
Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake,

1 Unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.] Conf.

And

'Unwept, unhonoured, and unsung.'-Scott,

Unhouselled, disappointed, unaneled.'-Hamlet,

and in Homer, ἀφρήτωρ, ἀθέμιστος, ἀνέστιος,

2 Let him lay.] Lie; jacio used for jace. The grammar of 'Childe Harold' is generally correct, though in other works Byron is careless. See Like he 'Marino Faliero;''save I'-' Heaven and Earth,'

1

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.

2

CLXXXII

Thy shores are empires, changed in all save theeAssyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they? Thy waters washed them power 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.

CLXXXIII

-

Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form
Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,-
Calm or convulsed, in breeze or gale or storm,
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime
Dark-heaving-boundless, endless, and sublime,
The image of eternity, the throne

Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime
The monsters of the deep are made; each zone
Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.

CLXXXIV

And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy
Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be
Borne, like thy bubbles, onward from a boy
I wantoned with thy breakers-they to me

1 Lord of thee, and arbiter of war.] Alludes to the pretensions of -England as Queen of the Sea, to the right of search and declaration of blockades. See the Proclamation of 1801 with regard to Russian, Danish, and Swedish vessels. See D. J.' x. 65, And make the very billows pay them toll.

Assyria.] Seems to stand for Syria. All the commerce of the ancient and medieval world was Mediterranean, till from the New World and its discovery, power moved westward, first to the Peninsula, and then to England.