To hover on the verge of darkness; rays

CLXIX.

Peasants bring forth in safety.-Can it be,
O 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 hoarċ
Her many griefs for ONE: for she had pour'd
Her orisons for thee, and o'er thy head
Beheld her Iris.-Thou, too, lonely lord,
And desolate consort-vainly wert thon 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-hair'd Daughter of the Isles is laid,
The love of millions! How we did intrust
Futurity to her! and, though it must
Darken above our bones, yet fondly deem'd
Our children should obey her child, and bless'd
Her and her hoped-for seed, whose promise seem'd

CLXVI.

And send us prying into the abyss,

To gather what we shall be when the frame Shall be resolved to something less than this Its wretched essence; and to dream of fame, And wipe the dust from off the idle name We never more shall hear,-but never more, Oh, happier thought! can we be made the same: It is enough in sooth that once we bore These fardels of the heart-the heart whose sweat

was gore.

CLXVII.

Hark! forth from the abyss a voice proceeds, A long low distant murmur of dread sound, Such as arises when a nation bleeds With some deep and immedicable wound; [ground, Through storm and darkness yawns the rending The gulf is thick with phantoms, but the chief Seems royal still, though with her head discrown'd, And pale, but lovely, with maternal grief She clasps a babe, to whom her breast yields no relief.

CLXVIII.

Scion of chiefs 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 hush'd that pang for ever: with thee fled The present happiness and promised joy

beam'd.

CLXXI.

Woe unto us, not her; (1) 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 Its knell in princely ears, till the o'erstung Nations have arm'd in madness, the strange fate(2) Which tumbles mightiest sovereigns, and hath flung Against their blind omnipotence a weight Within the opposing scale, which crushes soon or late,

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 link'd the electric chain of that despair, Whose shock was as an earthquake's, and opprest The land which loved thee so that none could love

thee best.

CLXXIII.

Lo, Nemi! (3) navell'd 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 cherish'd hate, its surface wears
A deep cold settled aspect nought can shake,

sary, as it is expressed on a very solemn occasion, that I should become as a little child. Notwithstanding my disappointment, I proceeded to copy some of those excellent works. I viewed them again and again; even affected to feel their merit and admire them more than I really did. In a short time, a new taste and a new perception began to dawn upon me, and I was convinced that I had origin. ally formed a false opinion of the perfection of the art, and that this great painter was well entitled to the high rank which he holds in the admiration of the world. The truth is, that if these works had really been what I had expected, they would have contained beauties suficial and alluring, but by no means such as would have entitled them to the great reputation which they have borne so long, and so justly obtained."-L. E.

(1) "The death of the Princess Charlotte has been a shock even here (Venice), and must have been an earthquake at home. The fate of this poor girl is melancholy in every respect; dying at twenty or so, in childbed-of a boy too, a present princess and a future queen, and just as she began to be happy, and to enjoy herself, and the hopes which she inspired. I feel sorry in every respect." B. Letters. -L. E.

(2) Mary died on the scaffold; Elizabeth of a broken heart; Charles V. a hermit; Louis XIV. a bankrupt in means and glory; Cromwell of anxiety; and, "the greatest is behind," Napoleon lives a prisoner. To these sovereigns a long but superfluous list might be added of names equally illustrious and unhappy.

(3) The village of Nemi was near the Arician retreat of

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 sprang the epic war,
"Arms and the man," whose re-ascending star
Rose o'er an empire:-but beneath thy right
Tully reposed from Rome;---and where yon bar
Of girdling mountains intercepts the sight
The Sabine farm was till'd, the weary bard's delight.(1)|
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 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

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
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 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,

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.

Egeria, and, from the shades which embosomed the temple of Diana, has preserved to this day its distinctive appellation of The Grove. Nemi is but an evening's ride from the comfortable inn of Albano.

(1) The whole declivity of the Alban hill is of unrivalled beauty, and from the convent on the highest point, which bas succeeded to the temple of the Latian Jupiter, the prosect embraces all the objects alluded to in this stanza; the Mediterranean; the whole scene of the latter half of the ned, and the coast from beyond the mouth of the Tiber, to the headland of Circæum and the Cape of Terracina.See Historical Notes, at the end of this Canto, No. XXXI. -L.E.]

(2) When Lord Byron wrote this stanza, he had, no

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.

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 these 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 Mediter ranean' would be a noble subject for a poem." Croker's Boswell, vol. iii. p. 400.-L. E.

zin

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-'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 (2)-my song hath ceased-my
Has died into an echo; it is fit
[theme

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,

A1 If such there were-with you, the moral of his strain!

HISTORICAL NOTES

TO CANTO IV.

I.

STATE DUNGEONS OF VENICE.

"I stood in Fenice, on the Bridge of Sighs; A palace and a prison on each hand."

Stanza i. lines 1. and 2.

THE communication between the ducal palace and the prisons of Venice is by a gloomy bridge, or covered gallery, high above the water, and divided by a stone wall into a passage and a cell. The state dungeons, called "pozzi," or wells, were sunk in the thick walls of the palace; and the prisoner when taken out to die was conducted across the gallery to the other side, and being then led back into the other [ compartment, or cell, upon the bridge, was there strangled. The low portal through which the crimi

(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 unaf fected 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 indignant boy wish himself back to the keen air and boisterous billows that broke lonely upon the simple and soul-invigorating hauuts of his childhood! How

nal was taken into this cell is now walled up; bu
the passage is still open, and is still known by the
name of the Bridge of Sighs. The pozzi are under
the flooring of the chamber at the foot of the bridge.
They were formerly twelve. but on the first arrival of
the French, the Venetians hastily blocked or broke
up the deeper of these dungeons. You may still,
however, descend by a trap-door, and crawl down
through holes, half-choked by rubbish, to the depth
of two stories below the first range. If you are in
want of consolation for the extinction of patrician
power, perhaps you may find it there; scarcely a ray
of light glimmers into the narrow gallery which leads
to the cells, and the places of confinement themselves
are totally dark. A small hole in the wall admitted
the damp air of the passages, and served for the in-
troduction of the prisoner's food. A wooden pallet,
raised a foot from the ground, was the only furniture.
The conductors tell you that a light was not allowed.
The cells are about five paces in length, two and a
half in width, and seven feet in height. They are
directly beneath one another, and respiration is some-
what difficult in the lower holes. Only one pri-
soner was found when the republicans descended into
these hideous recesses, and he is said to have been
confined sixteen years.
But the inmates of the dun-
geons beneath had left traces of their repentance, or
of their despair, which are still visible, and may,
perhaps, owe something to recent ingenuity. Some
of the detained appear to have offended against, and
others to have belonged to, the sacred body, not only
from their signatures, but from the churches and bel-
fries which they have scratched upon the walls. The
reader may not object to see a specimen of the records
prompted by so terrific a solitude. As nearly as they
could be copied by more than one pencil, three of them
are as follows:--

I. NON TI FIDAR AD ALCUNO PENSA e TACI
SE FUGIA VUOI DE SPIONI INSIDIE e LACCI
IL PENTIRTI PENTIRTI NULLA GIOVA
MA BEN DI VALOR TUO LA VERA PROVA

1607. AFI 2. GENARO, FUI RETENTO PLA BESTIEMMA PAVER DATO DA MANZAR A UN MORTO

2. UN PARLAR POCO et NEGARE PRONTO et

IACOMO. GRITTI. SCRISSE

UN PENSAR AL FINE PUO DARE LA VITA

A NOI ALTRI MESCHINI

1605.

EGO JOHN BAPTISTA AD ECCLESIAM CORTELLARIUS.

3. DI CHI MI FIDO GUARDAMI DIO
DA CHI NON MI FIDO MI GUARDERÒ 10

A
TA HA NA
V. LAS .C.K..

did he prefer some ghost-story; some tale of second-sight; some relation of Robin Hood's feats; 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.—L. E.

(2) "It was a thought worthy of the great spirit of Byron,

The copyist has followed, not corrected, the sole cisms, some of which are, however, not quite so decided, since the letters were evidently scratched in the dark. It only need be observed, that bestemmia and mangiar may be read in the first inscription, which was probably written by a prisoner confined for some act of impiety committed at a funeral; that Cortellarius is the name of a parish on terra firma, near the sea; and that the last initials evidently are put for Viva la santa Chiesa Cattolica Romana.

II.

SONGS OF THE GONDOLIERS.

"In Venice Tusso's echoes are no more."

Stanza iii. line 1. The well-known song of the gondoliers, of alternate stanzas, from Tasso's Jerusalem, has died with the independence of Venice. Editions of the poem, with the original in one column and the Venetian variations on the other, as sung by the boatmen, were once common, and are still to be found. The following extract will serve to show the difference between the Tuscan epic and the "Canto alla Barcariola."

ORIGINAL.

Canto l'arme pietose, e 'l capitano

Che 'l gran Sepolcro libero di Cristo. Molto agli oprò col senuo, e con la mano Molto soffri nel glorioso acquisto;

E in van l' Inferno a lui s' oppose, e in vano S' armò d' Asia, e di Libia il popol misto, Che il Ciel gli diè favore, e sotto a i Santi Segni ridusse i suoi compagni erranti.

VENETIAN.

L'arme pietose de cantar gho vogia,

E de Goffredo la immortal braura
Che al fin l'ha libera co strassia, e dogia
Del nostro buon Gesù la Sepoltura

De mezo mondo unito, e de quel Bogia

Missier Pluton non l' ha bu mai paura:
Dio l' ha agiuta, ei compagni sparpagnai
Tutti ghi ha messi insieme i di del Dai.

Some of the elder gondoliers will, however, take up and continue a stanza of their once-familiar bard.

On the 7th of last January, the author of Childe Harold, and another Englishman, the writer of this notice, rowed to the Lido with two singers, one of whom was a carpenter, and the other a gondolier. The former placed himself at the prow, the latter at the stern, of the boat. A little after leaving the quay of the Piazzetta, they began to sing, and continued their exercise until we arrived at the island. They gave us, amongst other essays, the Death of Clorinda, and the Palace of Armida; and did not sing the Venetian but the Tuscan verses. The carpenter, however, who was the cleverer of the two, and was frequently obliged to prompt his companion, told us that

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 bas sunk, and all shall one day sink,- of that eternity wherein the scorn and the contempt of man, and the melauchory 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

he could translate the original. He added, that he could sing almost three hundred stanzas, but had not spirits (morbin was the word he used) to learn any more, or to sing what he already knew: a man must have idle time on his hands to acquire, or to repeat, and, said the poor fellow, "look at my cothes and at me; I am starving." This speech was more affecting than his performance, which habit alone can make attractive. The recitative was shrill, screaming, and monotonous; and the gondolier behind assisted his voice by holding his hand to one side of his mouth. The carpenter used a quiet action, which he evidently endeavoured to restrain, but was too much interested in his subject altogether to repress. From these men we learnt that singing is not confined to the gondoliers, and that, although the chant is seldom, if ever, voluntary, there are still several amongst the lower classes who are acquainted with a few stanzas.

It does not appear that it is usual for the performers to row and sing at the same time. Although the verses of the Jerusalem are no longer casually heard, there is yet much music upon the Venetian canals; and upon holidays, those strangers who are not near or informed enough to distinguish the words, may fancy that many of the gondolas still resound with the strains of Tasso. The writer of some remarks which appeared in the Curiosities of Literature must excuse his being twice quoted; for, with the exception of some phrases a little too ambitious and extravagant, he has furnished a very exact, as well as agreeable, description:—

"In Venice the gondoliers know by heart long passages from Ariosto and Tasso, and often chant them with a peculiar melody. But this talent seems at present on the decline:at least, after taking some pains, I could find no more than two persons who delivered to me in this way a passage from Tasso. I must add, that the late Mr. Berry once chanted to me a passage in Tasso in the manner, as he assured me, of the gondoliers.

"There are always two concerned, who alternately sing the strophes. We know the melody eventually by Rousseau, to whose songs it is printed; it has properly no melodious movement, and is a sort of medium between the canto fermo and the canto figurato; it approaches to the former by recitativical declamation, and to the latter by passages and course, by which one syllable is detained and embellished.

"I entered a gondola by moonlight; one singer placed himself forwards and the other aft, and thus proceeded to San Giorgio. One began the song: when he had ended his strophe, the other took up the lay, and so continued the song alternately. Throughout the whole of it, the same notes invariably returned, but, according to the subject matter of the strophe, they laid a greater or a smaller stress, sometimes on one, and sometimes on another note, and indeed changed

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 hit to have his daily haunt as by the roaring of the waves? It was thus that Homer represented Achilles in his moments of nugovernable and inconsolable loss for Patroclug. It was thus he chose to depict the paternal despair of Chriseus:-Βῆ δ ̓ ἀκέων παρὰ θῖνα πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης. Wilson.-L. E.

the enunciation of the whole strophe as the object of the poem altered.

"On the whole, however, the sounds were hoarse and screaming: they seemed, in the manner of all rude uncivilised men, to make the excellency of their singing consist in the force of their voice: one seemed desirous of conquering the other by the strength of his lungs; and, so far from receiving delight from this scene (shut up as I was in the box of the gondola), I found myself in a very unpleasant situation.

"My companion, to whom I communicated this circumstance, being very desirous to keep up the credit of his countrymen, assured me that this singing was very delightful when heard at a distance. Accordingly we got out upon the shore, leaving one of the singers in the gondola, while the other went to the distance of some hundred paces. They now be gan to sing against one another, and I kept walking up and down between them both, so as always to leave him who was to begin his part. I frequently stood still, and hearkened to the one and to the other. "Here the scene was properly introduced. The strong declamatory, and, as it were, shrieking sound, met the ear from far, and called forth the attention; the quickly-succeeding transitions, which necessarily required to be sung in a lower tone, seemed like plaintive strains succeeding the vociferations of emotion or of pain. The other, who listened attentively, immediately began where the other left off, answering him in milder or more vehement notes according as the purport of the stropa .equired. The sleepy canals, the lofty build gs, the splendour of the moon, eep snadows of the few gondolas that moved like spirits hither and thither, increased the striking peculiarity of the scene; and, amidst all these circumstances, it was easy to confess the character of this wonderful harmony.

the

ganised person, said quite unexpectedly: E singolare come quel canto intenerisce, e molto più quando lo cantano meglio.'

"I was told that the women of Lido, the long row of islands that divides the Adriatic from the Lagoons,(1) particularly the women of the extreme districts of Malamocco and Palestrina, sing in like manner the works of Tasso to these and similar tunes.

"They have the custom, when their husbands are fishing out at sea, to sit along the shore in the evenings and vociferate these songs, and continue to do so with great violence, till each of them can distinguish the responses of her own husband at a distance." (2) The love of music and of poetry distinguishes all classes of Venetians, even amongst the tuneful sons of Italy. The city itself can occasionally furnish respectable audiences for two and even three opera-houses at a time; and there are few events in private life that do not call forth a printed and circulated sonnet. Does a physician or a lawyer take his degree, or a clergyman preach his maiden sermon, has a surgeon performed an operation, would a harlequin announce his departure or his benefit, are you to be congratulated on a marriage, or a birth, or a lawsuit, the Muses are invoked to furnish the same number of syllables, and the individual triumphs blaze abroad, in virgin white or party-coloured placards, on half the corners of the capital. The last curtsey of a favourite “prima donna" brings down a shower of these poetical tributes from those upper regions from which, in our theatres, nothing but cupids and snow-storms are accustomed to descend. There is a poetry in the very life of a Venetian, which, in its common course, is varied with those surprises and changes so recommendable in fiction, but so different from the sober monotony of northern existence; amusements are raised into duties, duties are softened into amusements, and every object being considered as equally making a part of the business of life, is announced and performed with the same earnest indifference and gay assiduity. The Venetian gazette constantly closes its columns with the following triple advertisement:—

Charade.

"At a distance he hears another, perhaps utterly unknown to him. Melody and verse immediately attach the two strangers; he becomes the responsive echo to the former, and exerts himself to be heard as he had heard the other. By a tacit convention, they alternate verse for verse; though the song should last the whole night through, they entertain themselves without fatigue: the hearers, who are passing between the two, take part in the amusement.

"This vocal performance sounds best at a great distance, and is then inexpressibly charming, as it only fulûls its design in the sentiment of remoteness. It is plaintive, but not dismal in its sound, and at times it is scarcely possible to refrain from tears. My companion, who otherwise was not a very delicately or

(1) The writer meant Lido, which is not a long row of islands, but a long island: littus, the shore.

Theatres.

St. Moses, opera.

St. Benedict, a comedy of characters.
St. Luke, repose.

When it is recollected what the Catholics believe it worthy of a more respectable niche than between their consecrated wafer to be, we may perhaps think poetry and the playhouse.

III.

THE LION AND HORSES OF ST. MARK'S. "St. Mark yet sees his lion where he stood Stand,"

Stanza xi. line 6.

The Lion has lost nothing by his journey to the Invalides but the gospel, which supported the paw; that is now on a level with the other foot. The Horses also are returned to the ill-chosen spot whence

(2) Curiosities of Literature, vol. ii. p. 156. edit. 1807, and Appendix xxiz. to Black's Life of Tasso.