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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.

of The Grove. Nemi is but an evening's ride from the comfortable inn of Albano.

3 The whole declivity of the Alban hill is of unrivalled beauty, and from the convent on the highest point, which has succeeded to the temple of the Latian Jupiter, the prospect embraces all the objects alluded to in this stanza; the Mediterranean; the whole scene of the latter half of the Eneid, and the coast from beyond the mouth of the Tiber to the headland of Circæum and the Cape of Terracina - See Appendix," Historical Notes," No. XXXI.

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[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 infe riority, 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."- Life of Johnson, vol. v. p. 145. ed. 1835.]

[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 Aberdeenshire. 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 many thousand times did the moody, sullen, and indig nant 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; some harrowing narrative of buccancerexploits, to all of Horace, and Virgil, and Homer, that was dinned into his repulsive spirit! To the shock of this change

Were a delight; and if the freshening sea
Made them a terror-'t was 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.

CLXXXV.

My task is done 3-my song hath ceased-my theme

Has died into an echo; it is fit

The spell should break of this protracted dream. The torch shall be extinguish'd which hath lit My midnight lamp-and what is writ, is writ, Would it were worthier! but I am not now That which I have been-and my visions flit Less palpably before me-and the glow Which in my spirit dwelt is fluttering, faint, and low.

CLXXXVI.

Farewell! a word that must be, and hath been
A sound which makes us linger; -
;-yet-farewell!
Ye! who have traced the Pilgrim to the scene
Which is his last, if in your memories dwell
A thought which once was his, if on ye swell
A single recollection, not in vain

He wore his sandal-shoon, and scallop-shell;
Farewell with him alone may rest the pain,
If such there were- - with you, the moral of his strain !

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.]

3 ["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 mutability, 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 ail shal! 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 and inconsolable grief for the loss of Patroclus. It was thus he chose to depict the paternal despair of Chriseus

Βῆ δ ̓ ἀκίων παρὰ εἶνα πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης." - WILSON.]

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THE tale which these disjointed fragments present, is founded upon circumstances now less common in the East than formerly; either because the ladies are more circumspect than in the "olden time," or because the Christians have better fortune, or less enterprise. The story, when entire, contained the adventures of a female slave, who was thrown, in the Mussulman manner, into the sea for infidelity, and avenged by a young Venetian, her lover, at the time the Seven Islands were possessed by the Republic of Venice, and soon after the Arnauts were beaten back from the Morea, which they had ravaged for some time subsequent to the Russian invasion. The desertion of the Mainotes, on being refused the plunder of Misitra, led to the abandonment of that enterprise, and to the desolation of the Morea, during which the cruelty exercised on all sides was unparalleled even in the annals of the faithful. 2

1 [The "Giaour" was published in May 1813, and abundantly sustained the impression created by the two first cantos of Childe Harold. It is obvious that in this, the first of his romantic narratives, Lord Byron's versification reflects the admiration he always avowed for Mr. Coleridge's "Christabel," the irregular rhythm of which had already been adopted in the "Lay of the Last Minstrel." The fragmentary style of the composition was suggested by the then new and popular" Columbus" of Mr. Rogers. As to the subject, it was not merely by recent travel that the author had familiarised himself with Turkish history. "Old Knolles," he said at Missolonghi, a few weeks before his death, "was one of the first books that gave me pleasure when a child; and I believe it had much influence on my future wishes to visit the Levant, and gave, perhaps, the oriental colouring which is observed in my poetry." In the margin of his copy of Mr. D'Israeli's Essay on the Literary Character, we find the following note: "Knolles, Cantemir, De Tott, Lady M. W. Montague, Hawkins's translation from Mignot's History of the Turks, the Arabian Nights-all travels or histories, or books upon the East, I could meet with, I had read, as well as Ricaut, before I was ten years old."]

[An event, in which Lord Byron was personally concerned, undoubtedly supplied the groundwork of this tale; but for the story, so circumstantially put forth, of his having himself been the lover of this female slave, there is no foundation. The girl whose life the poet saved at Athens was not,

The Giaour.

No breath of air to break the wave
That rolls below the Athenian's grave,
That tomb which, gleaming o'er the cliff,
First greets the homeward-veering skiff,
High o'er the land he saved in vain;
When shall such hero live again?

Fair clime! where every season smiles Benignant o'er those blessed isles, Which, seen from far Colonna's height, Make glad the heart that hails the sight, And lend to loneliness delight. There mildly dimpling, Ocean's cheek Reflects the tints of many a peak Caught by the laughing tides that lave These Edens of the eastern wave:

we are assured by Sir John Hobhouse, an object of his Lord. ship's attachment, but of that of his Turkish servant. For the Marquis of Sligo's account of the affair, see Moore's Notices.]

3 A tomb above the rocks on the promontory, by some supposed the sepulchre of Themistocles. -[" There are." says Cumberland, in his Observer, "a few lines by Plato, upon the tomb of Themistocles, which have a turn of elegant and pathetic simplicity in them, that deserves a better translation than I can give :

By the sea's margin, on the watery strand,
Thy monument, Themistocles, shall stand:
By this directed to thy native shore,

The merchant shall convey his freighted store;
And when our fleets are summoned to the fight,
Athens shall conquer with thy tomb in sight."]

"Of the beautiful flow of Byron's fancy," says Moore, "when its sources were once opened on any subject, the Giaour affords one of the most remarkable instances: this poem having accumulated under his hand, both in printing and through successive editious, till from four hundred lines, of which it consisted in its first copy, it at present amounts to fourteen hundred. The plan, indeed, which he had adopted, of a series of fragments, a set of orient pearls at random strung left him free to introduce, without reference to more than the general complexion of his story, whatever sen

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The maid for whom his melody,

His thousand songs are heard on high,
Blooms blushing to her lover's tale :
His queen, the garden queen, his Rose,
Cubent by winds, unchill'd by snows,
Far from the winters of the west,
By every breeze and season blest,
Returns the sweets by nature given
In softest incense back to heaven;
And grateful yields that smiling sky
Her fairest hue and fragrant sigh.
And many a summer flower is there,
And many a shade that love might share,
And many a grotto, meant for rest,
That holds the pirate for a guest;
Whose bark in sheltering cove below
Lurks for the passing peaceful prow,
Till the gay mariner's guitar?

Is heard, and seen the evening star;
Then stealing with the muffled oar,
Far shaded by the rocky shore,
Rush the night-prowlers on the prey,
And turn to groans his roundelay.
Strange-that where Nature loved to trace,
As if for Gods, a dwelling place,

And every charm and grace hath mix'd
Within the paradise she fix'd,
There man, enamour'd of distress,
Should mar it into wilderness,

And trample, brute-like, o'er each flower
That tasks not one laborious hour;
Nor claims the culture of his hand
To bloom along the fairy land,

timents or images his fancy, in its excursions, could collect; and, how little fettered he was by any regard to connection in these additions, appears from a note which accompanied his own copy of this paragraph, in which he says, 'I have not yet fixed the place of insertion for the following lines, but will, when I see you as I have no copy.' Even into this new passage, rich as it was at first, his fancy afterwards poured a fresh infusion." The value of these after-touches of the master may be appreciated by comparing the following verses, from his original draft of this paragraph, with the form which they now wear :—

"Fair clime! where ceaseless summer smiles,
Benignant o'er those blessed isles,
Which, seen from far Colonna's height,
Make glad the heart that hails the sight,

And give to loneliness delight.

There shine the bright abodes ye seek,
Like dimples upon Ocean's cheek,
So smiling round the waters lave
These Edens of the eastern wave.

Or if, at times, the transient breeze
Break the smooth crystal of the seas,
Or brush one blossom from the trees,
How grateful is the gentle air

That waves and wafts the fragrance there." The whole of this passage, from line 7. down to line 167., "Who heard it first had cause to grieve," was not in the first edition.]

The attachment of the nightingale to the rose is a well. known Persian fable. If I mistake not, the "Bulbul of a thousand tales" is one of his appellations. [Thus, Mesihi, as translated by Sir William Jones :

"Come, charming maid! and hear thy poet sing,
Thyself the rose, and he the bird of spring:
Love bids him sing, and Love will be obey'd.
Be gay: too soon the flowers of spring will fade."]

But springs as to preclude his care,
And sweetly woos him-but to spare!
Strange-that where all is peace beside,
There passion riots in her pride,
And lust and rapine wildly reign
To darken o'er the fair domain.
It is as though the fiends prevail'd
Against the seraphs they assail'd

And, fix'd on heavenly thrones, should dwell
The freed inheritors of hell;

So soft the scene, so form'd for joy,

So curst the tyrants that destroy!

He who hath bent him o'er the dead 3

Ere the first day of death is fled,
The first dark day of nothingness,

The last of danger and distress,
(Before Decay's effacing fingers

Have swept the lines where beauty lingers,)

And mark'd the mild angelic air,
The rapture of repose that's there,
The fix'd yet tender traits that streak
The langour of the placid cheek,
And-but for that sad shrouded eye,

That fires not, wins not, weeps not, now,
And but for that chill, changeless brow,
Where cold Obstruction's apathy 5
Appals the gazing mourner's heart,
As if to him it could impart

The doom he dreads, yet dwells upon;
Yes, but for these and these alone,
Some moments, ay,, one treacherous hour,
He still might doubt the tyrant's power;
So fair, so calm, so softly seal'd,

The first, last look by death reveal'd !6
Such is the aspect of this shore;

'Tis Greece, but living Greece no more 17 So coldly sweet, so deadly fair,

We start, for soul is wanting there.

2 The guitar is the constant amusement of the Greek sailor by night with a steady fair wind, and during a calm, it is accompanied always by the voice, and often by dancing.

3 [lf once the public notice is drawn to a poet, the talents he exhibits on a nearer view, the weight his mind carries with it in his every-day intercourse, somehow or other, are reflected around on his compositions, and co-operate in giving a collateral force to their impression on the public. To this we must assign some part of the impression made by the "Giaour." The thirty-five lines beginning "He who hath bent him o'er the dead" are so beautiful, so original, and so utterly beyond the reach of any one whose poetical genius was not very decided, and very rich, that they alone, under the circumstances explained, were sufficient to secure celebrity to this poem. -SIR E. BRYDGES.]

["And mark'd the almost dreaming air

Which speaks the sweet repose that's there."- MS.]

5 "Ay, but to die and go we know not where, To lye in cold obstruction?"

Measure for Measure, act lii. sc. 2.

6 I trust that few of my readers have ever had an oppor. tunity of witnessing what is here attempted in description; but those who have will probably retain a painful remembrance of that singular beauty which pervades, with few exceptions, the features of the dead, a few hours, and but for a few hours, after "the spirit is not there." It is to be remarked in cases of violent death by gun-shot wounds, the expression is always that of languor, whatever the natural energy of the sufferer's character: but in death from a stab the countenance preserves its traits of feeling or ferocity, and the mind its bias, to the last.

7 [In Dallaway's Constantinople, a book which Lord Byron is not unlikely to have consulted, I find a passage quoted from Gillies's History of Greece, which contains, perhaps, the first seed of the thought thus expanded into full perfection by

Hers is the loveliness in death,

That parts not quite with parting breath;
But beauty with that fearful bloom,
That hue which haunts it to the tomb,

Expression's last receding ray,

A gilded halo hovering round decay,

The farewell beam of Feeling past away! Spark of that flame, perchance of heavenly birth, Which gleams, but warms no more its cherish'd earth!'

Clime of the unforgotten brave ! 2 Whose land from plain to mountain-cave Was Freedom's home or Glory's grave! Shrine of the mighty! can it be, That this is all remains of thee? Approach, thou craven crouching slave. Say, is not this Thermopylæ ? These waters blue that round you lave, Oh servile offspring of the freePronounce what sea, what shore is this? The gulf, the rock of Salamis ! These scenes, their story not unknown, Arise, and make again your own; Snatch from the ashes of your sires The embers of their former fires; . And he who in the strife expires Will add to theirs a name of fear That Tyranny shall quake to hear, And leave his sons a hope, a fame, They too will rather die than shame : For Freedom's battle once begun, Bequeath'd by bleeding Sire to Son, Though baffled oft is ever won. Bear witness, Greece, thy living page, Attest it many a deathless age! While kings, in dusty darkness hid, Have left a nameless pyramid, Thy heroes, though the general doom Hath swept the column from their tomb, A mightier monument command, The mountains of their native land! There points thy Muse to stranger's eye The graves of those that cannot die ! "T were long to tell, and sad to trace, Each step from splendour to disgrace, Enough-no foreign foe could quell Thy soul, till from itself it fell; Yes! Self-abasement paved the way To villain-bonds and despot sway.

What can he tell who treads thy shore? No legend of thine olden time,

No theme on which the muse might soar High as thine own in days of yore,

:

genius "The present state of Greece compared to the ancient, is the silent obscurity of the grave contrasted with the vivid lustre of active life."- MOORE.]

[There is infinite beauty and effect, though of a painful and almost oppressive character, in this extraordinary passage; in which the author has illustrated the beautiful, but still and melancholy aspect of the once busy and glorious shores of Greece, by an image more true, more mournful, and more exquisitely finished, than any that we can recollect in the whole compass of poetry. JEFFREY.]

2 [From this line to the conclusion of the paragraph, the MS. is written in a hurried and almost illegible hand, as if these splendid lines had been poured forth in one continuous burst of poetic feeling, which would hardly allow time for the hand to follow the rapid flow of the imagination.]

Athens is the property of the Kislar Aga (the slave of the seraglio and guardian of the women), who appoints the Way

3

When man was worthy of thy clime. The hearts within thy valleys bred, The fiery souls that, might have led Thy sons to deeds sublime, Now crawl from cradle to the grave, Slaves-nay, the bondsmen of a slave, 3 And callous, save to crime; Stain'd with each evil that pollutes Mankind, where least above the brutes; Without even savage virtue blest, Without one free or valiant breast. Still to the neighbouring ports they waft Proverbial wiles, and ancient craft; In this the subtle Greek is found, For this, and this alone, renown'd. In vain might Liberty invoke The spirit to its bondage broke, Or raise the neck that courts the yoke: No more her sorrows I bewail, Yet this will be a mournful tale, And they who listen may believe, Who heard it first had cause to grieve.

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Who thundering comes on blackest steed, 4
With slacken'd bit and hoof of speed?
Beneath the clattering iron's sound
The cavern'd echoes wake around
In lash for lash, and bound for bound;
The foam that streaks the courser's side
Seems gather'd from the ocean-tide:
Though weary waves are sunk to rest,
There's none within his rider's breast;
And though to-morrow's tempest lower,
"Tis calmer than thy heart, young Giaour! 5
I know thee not, I loathe thy race,

But in thy lineaments I trace
What time shall strengthen, not efface:
Though young and pale, that sallow front
Is scathed by fiery passion's brunt;

wode. A pander and eunuch - these are not polite, yet true appellations — now governs the governor of Athens !

4 [The reciter of the tale is a Turkish fisherman, who has been employed during the day in the gulf of Egina, and in the evening, apprehensive of the Mainote pirates who infest the coast of Attica, lands with his boat on the harbour of Port Leone, the ancient Piræus. He becomes the eye-witness of nearly all the incidents in the story, and in one of them is a principal agent. It is to his feelings, and particularly to his religious prejudices, that we are indebted for some of the most forcible and splendid parts of the poem. GEORGE ELLIS.]

5 [In Dr. Clarke's Travels, this word, which means Infidel, is always written according to its English pronunciation, Djour. Lord Byron adopted the Italian spelling usual among the Franks of the Levant.]

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