TO HIS EXCELLENCY
PRINCE ALEXANDER MAVROCORDATO
LATE SECRETARY FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS TO THE HOSPODAR OF WALLACHIA
THE DRAMA OF HELLAS IS INSCRIBED AS AN
IMPERFECT TOKEN OF THE ADMIRATION,
SYMPATHY, AND FRIENDSHIP OF
THE AUTHOR
PISA, November 1, 1821.
THE poem of Hellas, written at the suggestion of the events of the moment, is a mere improvise, and derives its interest (should it be found to possess any) solely from the intense sympathy which the Author feels with the cause he would celebrate.
The subject, in its present state, Is insusceptible of being treated otherwise than lyrically, and if I have called this poem a drama from the circumstance of its being composed in dialogue, the licence is not greater than that which has been assumed by other poets who have called their productions epics, only because they have been divided into twelve or twenty-four books.
The Persae of Aeschylus afforded me the first model of my conception, although the decision of the glorious contest now waging in Greece being yet suspended forbids a catastrophe parallel to the return of Xerxes and the desolation of the Persians. I have, therefore, contented myself with exhibiting a series of lyric pictures, and with having wrought upon the curtain of futurity, which falls upon the unfinished scene, such figures of indistinct and visionary delineation as suggest the final triumph of the Greek cause as a portion of the cause of civilisation and social improvement.
The drama (if drama it must be called) is, however, so inartificial that I doubt whether, if recited on the Thespian waggon to an Athenian village at the Dionysiaca, it would have obtained the prize of the goat. I shall bear with equanimity any punishment, greater than the loss of such a reward, which the Aristarchi of the hour may think fit to inflict.
The only goat-song which I have yet attempted has, I confess, in spite of the unfavourable nature of the subject, received a greater and a more valuable portion of applause than I expected or than it deserved.
Common fame is the only authority which I can allege for the details which form the basis of the poem, and I must trespass upon the forgiveness of my readers for the display of newspaper erudition to which I have been reduced. Undoubtedly, until the conclusion of the war, it will be impossible to obtain an account of it sufficiently authentic for historical materials; but poets have their privilege, and it is unquestionable that actions of the most exalted courage have been performed by the Greeks—that they have gained more than one naval victory, and that their defeat in Wallachia was signalized by circumstances of heroism more glorious even than victory.
The apathy of the rulers of the civilised world to the astonishing circumstance of the descendants of that nation to which they owe their civilisation, rising as it were from the ashes of their ruin, is something perfectly inexplicable to a mere spectator of the shows of this mortal scene. We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece. But for Greece—Rome, the instructor, the conqueror, or the metropolis of our ancestors, would have spread no illumination with her arms, and we might still have been savages and idolaters; or, what is worse, might have arrived at such a stagnant and miserable state of social institution as China and Japan possess.
The human form and the human mind attained to a perfection in Greece which has impressed its image on those faultless productions, whose very fragments are the despair of modern art, and has propagated impulses which cannot cease, through a thousand channels of manifest or imperceptible operation, to ennoble and delight mankind until the extinction of the race.
The modern Greek is the descendant of those glorious beings whom the imagination almost refuses to figure to itself as belonging to our kind, and he inherits much of their sensibility, their rapidity of conception, their enthusiasm, and their courage. If in many instances he is degraded by moral and political slavery to the practice of the basest vices it engenders—and that below the level of ordinary degradation—let us reflect that the corruption of the best produces the worst, and that habits which subsist only in relation to a peculiar state of social institution may be expected to cease as soon as that relation is dissolved. In fact, the Greeks, since the admirable novel of Anastasius could have been a faithful picture of their manners, have undergone most important changes; the flower of their youth, returning to their country from the universities of Italy, Germany, and France, have communicated to their fellow-citizens the latest results of that social perfection of which their ancestors were the original source. The University of Chios contained before the breaking out of the revolution eight hundred students, and among them several Germans and Americans. The munificence and energy of many of the Greek princes and merchants, directed to the renovation of their country with a spirit and a wisdom which has few examples, is above all praise.
The English permit their own oppressors to act according to their natural sympathy with the Turkish tyrant, and to brand upon their name the indelible blot of an alliance with the enemies of domestic happiness, of Christianity and civilisation.
Russia desires to possess, not to liberate Greece; and is contented to see the Turks, its natural enemies, and the Greeks, its intended slaves, enfeeble each other until one or both fall into its net. The wise and generous policy of England would have consisted in establishing the independence of Greece, and in maintaining it both against Russia and the Turk;—but when was the oppressor generous or just?
Should the English people ever become free, they will reflect upon the part which those who presume to represent their will have played in the great drama of the revival of liberty, with feelings which it would become them to anticipate. This is the age of the war of the oppressed against the oppressors, and every one of those ringleaders of the privileged gangs of murderers and swindlers, called Sovereigns, look to each other for aid against the common enemy, and suspend their mutual jealousies in the presence of a mightier fear. Of this holy alliance all the despots of the earth are virtual members. But a new race has arisen throughout Europe, nursed in the abhorrence of the opinions which are its chains, and she will continue to produce fresh generations to accomplish that destiny which tyrants foresee and dread.
The Spanish Peninsula is already free. France is tranquil in the enjoyment of a partial exemption from the abuses which its unnatural and feeble government are vainly attempting to revive. The seed of blood and misery has been sown in Italy, and a more vigorous race is arising to go forth to the harvest. The world waits only the news of a revolution of Germany to see the tyrants who have pinnacled themselves on its supineness precipitated into the ruin from which they shall never arise. Well do these destroyers of mankind know their enemy, when they impute the insurrection in Greece to the same spirit before which they tremble throughout the rest of Europe, and that enemy well knows the power and the cunning of its opponents, and watches the moment of their approaching weakness and inevitable division to wrest the bloody sceptres from their grasp.
Herald of Eternity. It is the day when all the sons of God
Wait in the roofless senate-house, whose floor
Is Chaos, and the immovable abyss
Frozen by His steadfast word to hyaline
· · · · · · ·
5 The shadow of God, and delegate
Of that before whose breath the universe
Is as a print of dew.
Hierarchs and kings
Who from your thrones pinnacled on the past
Sway the reluctant present, ye who sit
10 Pavilioned on the radiance or the gloom
Of mortal thought, which like an exhalation
Steaming from earth, conceals the of heaven
Which gave it birth, assemble here
Before your Father’s throne; the swift decree
15 Yet hovers, and the fiery incarnation
Is yet withheld, clothed in which it shall
annul
The fairest of those wandering isles that gem
The sapphire space of interstellar air,
20 That green and azure sphere, that earth enwrapped
Less in the beauty of its tender light
Than in an atmosphere of living spirit
Which interpenetrating all the …
it rolls from realm to realm
25 And age to age, and in its ebb and flow
Impels the generations
To their appointed place,
Whilst the high Arbiter
Beholds the strife, and at the appointed time
30 Sends His decrees veiled in eternal …
Within the circuit of this pendent orb
There lies an antique region, on which fell
The dews of thought in the world’s golden dawn
Earliest and most benign, and from it sprung
35 Temples and cities and immortal forms
And harmonies of wisdom and of song,
And thoughts, and deeds worthy of thoughts so fair.
And when the sun of its dominion failed,
And when the winter of its glory came,
40 The winds that stripped it bare blew on and swept
That dew into the utmost wildernesses
In wandering clouds of sunny rain that thawed
The unmaternal bosom of the North.
Haste, sons of God, for ye beheld,
45 Reluctant, or consenting, or astonished,
The stern decrees go forth, which heaped on Greece
Ruin and degradation and despair.
A fourth now waits: assemble, sons of God,
To speed or to prevent or to suspend,
50 If, as ye dream, such power be not withheld,
The unaccomplished destiny.
· · · · · · ·
Chorus.
55 Like wild doves scattered.
Space is roofless and bare,
And in the midst a cloudy shrine,
Dark amid thrones of light.
In the blue glow of hyaline
60 Golden worlds revolve and shine.
In flight
From every point of the Infinite,
Like a thousand dawns on a single night
The splendours rise and spread;
65 And through thunder and darkness dread
Light and music are radiated,
And in their pavilioned chariots led
By living wings high overhead
The giant Powers move,
70 Gloomy or bright as the thrones they fill.
· · · · · · ·
A chaos of light and motion
Upon that glassy ocean.
· · · · · · ·
The senate of the Gods is met,
Each in his rank and station set;
75 There is silence in the spaces—
Lo! Satan, Christ, and Mahomet
Start from their places!
Christ. Almighty Father!
Low-kneeling at the feet of Destiny
· · · · · · ·
80 There are two fountains in which spirits weep
When mortals err, Discord and Slavery named,
And with their bitter dew two Destinies
Filled each their irrevocable urns; the third,
Fiercest and mightiest, mingled both, and added
85 Chaos and Death, and slow Oblivion’s lymph,
And hate and terror, and the poisoned rain
· · · · · · ·
The Aurora of the nations. By this brow
Whose pores wept tears of blood, by these wide wounds,
By this imperial crown of agony,
90 By infamy and solitude and death,
For this I underwent, and by the pain
Of pity for those who would for me
The unremembered joy of a revenge,
For this I felt—by Plato’s sacred light,
95 Of which my spirit was a burning morrow—
By Greece and all she cannot cease to be.
Her quenchless words, sparks of immortal truth,
Stars of all night—her harmonies and forms,
Echoes and shadows of what Love adores
100 In thee, I do compel thee, send forth Fate,
Thy irrevocable child: let her descend,
A seraph-wingèd Victory [arrayed]
In tempest of the omnipotence of God
Which sweeps through all things.
105 From hollow leagues, from Tyranny which arms
Adverse miscreeds and emulous anarchies
To stamp, as on a wingèd serpent’s seed,
Upon the name of Freedom; from the storm
Of faction, which like earthquake shakes and sickens
110 The solid heart of enterprise; from all
By which the holiest dreams of highest spirits
Are stars beneath the dawn …
She shall arise
Victorious as the world arose from Chaos!
And as the Heavens and the Earth arrayed
115 Their presence in the beauty and the light
Of Thy first smile, O Father,—as they gather
The spirit of Thy love which paves for them
Their path o’er the abyss, till every sphere
Shall be one living Spirit,—so shall Greece—
120 Satan. Be as all things beneath the empyrean,
Mine! Art thou eyeless like old Destiny,
Thou mockery-king, crowned with a wreath of thorns?
Whose sceptre is a reed, the broken reed
Which pierces thee! whose throne a chair of scorn;
125 For seest thou not beneath this crystal floor
The innumerable worlds of golden light
Which are my empire, and the least of them which thou wouldst redeem from me?
Know’st thou not them my portion?
130 Or wouldst rekindle the strife
Which our great Father then did arbitrate
Which he assigned to his competing sons
Each his apportioned realm?
Thou Destiny,
Thou who art mailed in the omnipotence
135 Of Him who sends thee forth, whate’er thy task,
Speed, spare not to accomplish, and be mine
Thy trophies, whether Greece again become
The fountain in the desert whence the earth
Shall drink of freedom, which shall give it strength
140 To suffer, or a gulf of hollow death
To swallow all delight, all life, all hope.
Go, thou Vicegerent of my will, no less
Than of the Father’s; but lest thou shouldst faint,
The wingèd hounds, Famine and Pestilence,
145 Shall wait on thee, the hundred-forkèd snake
Insatiate Superstition still shall …
The earth behind thy steps, and War shall hover
Above, and Fraud shall gape below, and Change
Shall flit before thee on her dragon wings,
150 Convulsing and consuming, and I add
Three vials of the tears which daemons weep
When virtuous spirits through the gate of Death
Pass triumphing over the thorns of life,
Sceptres and crowns, mitres and swords and snares,
155 Trampling in scorn, like Him and Socrates.
The first is Anarchy; when Power and Pleasure,
Glory and science and security,
On Freedom hang like fruit on the green tree,
Then pour it forth, and men shall gather ashes.
The second Tyranny—
160 Christ. Obdurate spirit!
Thou seest but the Past in the To-come.
Pride is thy error and thy punishment.
Boast not thine empire, dream not that thy worlds
Are more than furnace-sparks or rainbow-drops
165 Before the Power that wields and kindles them.
True greatness asks not space, true excellence
Lives in the Spirit of all things that live,
Which lends it to the worlds thou callest thine.
· · · · · · ·
Mahomet.… Haste thou and fill the waning crescent
170 With beams as keen as those which pierced the shadow
Of Christian night rolled back upon the West,
When the orient moon of Islam rode in triumph
From Tmolus to the Acroceraunian snow.
· · · · · · ·
Wake, thou Word
175 Of God, and from the throne of Destiny
Even to the utmost limit of thy way
May Triumph
· · · · · · ·
Be thou a curse on them whose creed
Divides and multiplies the most high God.
Chorus of Greek Captive Women.
On thy restless pillow,—
They were stripped from Orient bowers,
By the Indian billow.
5 Be thy sleep
Calm and deep,
Like theirs who fell—not ours who weep!
Indian.
Away, unlovely dreams!
Away, false shapes of sleep!
10 Be his, as Heaven seems,
Clear, and bright, and deep!
Soft as love, and calm as death,
Sweet as a summer night without a breath.
Sleep, sleep! our song is laden
15 With the soul of slumber;
It was sung by a Samian maiden,
Whose lover was of the number
Who now keep
That calm sleep
20 Whence none may wake, where none shall weep.
Indian.
I touch thy temples pale!
I breathe my soul on thee!
And could my prayers avail,
All my joy should be
25 Dead, and I would live to weep,
So thou mightst win one hour of quiet sleep.
Chorus.
Breathe low, low
The spell of the mighty mistress now!
When Conscience lulls her sated snake,
30 And Tyrants sleep, let Freedom wake.
Breathe low—low
The words which, like secret fire, shall flow
Through the veins of the frozen earth—low, low!
Semichorus I.
Life may change, but it may fly not;
35 Hope may vanish, but can die not;
Truth be veiled, but still it burneth;
Love repulsed,—but it returneth!
Semichorus II.
Yet were life a charnel where
Hope lay coffined with Despair;
40 Yet were truth a sacred lie,
Love were lust—
Semichorus I.
If Liberty
Lent not life its soul of light,
Hope its iris of delight,
Truth its prophet’s robe to wear,
45 Love its power to give and bear.
In the great morning of the world,
The Spirit of God with might unfurled
The flag of Freedom over Chaos,
And all its banded anarchs fled,
50 Like vultures frighted from Imaus,
Before an earthquake’s tread.—
So from Time’s tempestuous dawn
Freedom’s splendour burst and shone:—
Thermopylae and Marathon
55 Caught, like mountains beacon-lighted,
The springing Fire.—The wingèd glory
On Philippi half-alighted,
Like an eagle on a promontory.
Its unwearied wings could fan
60 The quenchless ashes of Milan.
From age to age, from man to man,
It lived; and lit from land to land
Florence, Albion, Switzerland.
Then night fell; and, as from night,
65 Reassuming fiery flight,
From the West swift Freedom came,
Against the course of Heaven and doom,
A second sun arrayed in flame,
To burn, to kindle, to illume.
70 From far Atlantis its young beams
Chased the shadows and the dreams.
France, with all her sanguine steams,
Hid, but quenched it not; again
Through clouds its shafts of glory rain
75 From utmost Germany to Spain.
As an eagle fed with morning
Scorns the embattled tempest’s warning,
When she seeks her aerie hanging
In the mountain-cedar’s hair,
80 And her brood expect the clanging
Of her wings through the wild air,
Sick with famine:—Freedom, so
To what of Greece remaineth now
Returns; her hoary ruins glow
85 Like Orient mountains lost in day;
Beneath the safety of her wings
Her renovated nurslings prey,
And in the naked lightenings
Of truth they purge their dazzled eyes.
90 Let Freedom leave—where’er she flies,
A Desert, or a Paradise:
Let the beautiful and the brave
Share her glory, or a grave.
Semichorus I.
With the gifts of gladness
95 Greece did thy cradle strew;
Semichorus II.
With the tears of sadness
Greece did thy shroud bedew!
Semichorus I.
With an orphan’s affection
She followed thy bier through Time;
Semichorus II.
100 And at thy resurrection
Reappeareth, like thou, sublime!
Semichorus I.
If Heaven should resume thee,
To Heaven shall her spirit ascend;
Semichorus II.
If Hell should entomb thee,
105 To Hell shall her high hearts bend.
Semichorus I.
If Annihilation—–
Semichorus II.
Dust let her glories be!
And a name and a nation
Be forgotten, Freedom, with thee!
Indian.
110 His brow grows darker—breathe not—move not!
He starts—he shudders—ye that love not,
With your panting loud and fast,
Have awakened him at last.
Mahmud (starting from his sleep). Man the Seraglio-guard!
make fast the gate!
115 What! from a cannonade of three short hours?
’Tis false! that breach towards the Bosphorus
Cannot be practicable yet—who stirs?
Stand to the match; that when the foe prevails
One spark may mix in reconciling ruin
120 The conqueror and the conquered! Heave the tower
Into the gap—wrench off the roof!
(Enter HASSAN.) Ha! what!
The truth of day lightens upon my dream
And I am Mahmud still.
Hassan. Your Sublime Highness
Is strangely moved.
Mahmud. The times do cast strange shadows
125 On those who watch and who must rule their course,
Lest they, being first in peril as in glory,
Be whelmed in the fierce ebb:—and these are of them.
Thrice has a gloomy vision hunted me
As thus from sleep into the troubled day;
130 It shakes me as the tempest shakes the sea,
Leaving no figure upon memory’s glass.
Would that—–no matter. Thou didst say thou knewest
A Jew, whose spirit is a chronicle
Of strange and secret and forgotten things.
135 I bade thee summon him:—’tis said his tribe
Dream, and are wise interpreters of dreams.
Hassan. The Jew of whom I spake is old,—so old
He seems to have outlived a world’s decay;
The hoary mountains and the wrinkled ocean
140 Seem younger still than he;—his hair and beard
Are whiter than the tempest-sifted snow;
His cold pale limbs and pulseless arteries
Are like the fibres of a cloud instinct
With light, and to the soul that quickens them
145 Are as the atoms of the mountain-drift
To the winter wind:—but from his eye looks forth
A life of unconsumèd thought which pierces
The Present, and the Past, and the To-come.
Some say that this is he whom the great prophet
150 Jesus, the son of Joseph, for his mockery,
Mocked with the curse of immortality.
Some feign that he is Enoch: others dream
He was pre-adamite and has survived
Cycles of generation and of ruin.
155 The sage, in truth, by dreadful abstinence
And conquering penance of the mutinous flesh,
Deep contemplation, and unwearied study,
In years outstretched beyond the date of man,
May have attained to sovereignty and science
160 Over those strong and secret things and thoughts
Which others fear and know not.
Mahmud. I would talk
With this old Jew.
Hassan. Thy will is even now
Made known to him, where he dwells in a sea-cavern
’Mid the Demonesi, less accessible
165 Than thou or God! He who would question him
Must sail alone at sunset, where the stream
Of Ocean sleeps around those foamless isles,
When the young moon is westering as now,
And evening airs wander upon the wave;
170 And when the pines of that bee-pasturing isle,
Green Erebinthus, quench the fiery shadow
Of his gilt prow within the sapphire water,
Then must the lonely helmsman cry aloud
‘Ahasuerus!’ and the caverns round
175 Will answer ‘Ahasuerus!’ If his prayer
Be granted, a faint meteor will arise
Lighting him over Marmora, and a wind
Will rush out of the sighing pine-forest,
And with the wind a storm of harmony
180 Unutterably sweet, and pilot him
Through the soft twilight to the Bosphorus:
Thence at the hour and place and circumstance
Fit for the matter of their conference
The Jew appears. Few dare, and few who dare
185 Win the desired communion—but that shout
Bodes—–
[A shout within.
Mahmud. Evil, doubtless; like all human sounds.
Let me converse with spirits.
Hassan. That shout again.
Mahmud. This Jew whom thou hast summoned—
Hassan. Will be here—
Mahmud. When the omnipotent hour to which are yoked
190 He, I, and all things shall compel—enough!
Silence those mutineers—that drunken crew,
That crowd about the pilot in the storm.
Ay! strike the foremost shorter by a head!
They weary me, and I have need of rest.
195 Kings are like stars—they rise and set, they have
The worship of the world, but no repose.
[Exeunt severally.
Chorus.
200 Sparkling, bursting, borne away.
Who, through birth’s orient portal
And death’s dark chasm hurrying to and fro,
Clothe their unceasing flight
205 In the brief dust and light
Gathered around their chariots as they go;
New shapes they still may weave,
New gods, new laws receive,
Bright or dim are they as the robes they last
210 On Death’s bare ribs had cast.
A power from the unknown God,
A Promethean conqueror, came;
Like a triumphal path he trod
The thorns of death and shame.
215 A mortal shape to him
Was like the vapour dim
Which the orient planet animates with light;
Hell, Sin, and Slavery came,
Like bloodhounds mild and tame,
220 Nor preyed, until their Lord had taken flight;
The moon of Mahomet
Arose, and it shall set:
While blazoned as on Heaven’s immortal noon
The cross leads generations on.
225 Swift as the radiant shapes of sleep
From one whose dreams are Paradise
Fly, when the fond wretch wakes to weep,
And Day peers forth with her blank eyes;
So fleet, so faint, so fair,
230 The Powers of earth and air
Fled from the folding-star of Bethlehem:
Apollo, Pan, and Love,
And even Olympian Jove
Grew weak, for killing Truth had glared on them;
235 Our hills and seas and streams,
Dispeopled of their dreams,
Their waters turned to blood, their dew to tears,
Wailed for the golden years.
Enter MAHMUD, HASSAN, DAOOD, and others.
Mahmud. More gold? our ancestors bought gold with victory,
And shall I sell it for defeat?
240 Daood. The Janizars
Clamour for pay.
Mahmud. Go! bid them pay themselves
With Christian blood! Are there no Grecian virgins
Whose shrieks and spasms and tears they may enjoy?
No infidel children to impale on spears?
245 No hoary priests after that Patriarch
Who bent the curse against his country’s heart,
Which clove his own at last? Go! bid them kill,
Blood is the seed of gold.
Daood. It has been sown,
And yet the harvest to the sicklemen
Is as a grain to each.
250 Mahmud. Then, take this signet,
Unlock the seventh chamber in which lie
The treasures of victorious Solyman,—
An empire’s spoil stored for a day of ruin.
O spirit of my sires! is it not come?
255 The prey-birds and the wolves are gorged and sleep;
But these, who spread their feast on the red earth,
Hunger for gold, which fills not.—See them fed;
Then, lead them to the rivers of fresh death.
[Exit DAOOD.
O miserable dawn, after a night
260 More glorious than the day which it usurped!
O faith in God! O power on earth! O word
Of the great prophet, whose o’ershadowing wings
Darkened the thrones and idols of the West,
Now bright!—For thy sake cursèd be the hour,
265 Even as a father by an evil child,
When the orient moon of Islam rolled in triumph
From Caucasus to White Ceraunia!
Ruin above, and anarchy below;
Terror without, and treachery within;
270 The Chalice of destruction full, and all
Thirsting to drink; and who among us dares
To dash it from his lips? and where is Hope?
Hassan. The lamp of our dominion still rides high;
One God is God—Mahomet is His prophet.
275 Four hundred thousand Moslems, from the limits
Of utmost Asia, irresistibly
Throng, like full clouds at the Sirocco’s cry;
But not like them to weep their strength in tears;
They bear destroying lightning, and their step
280 Wakes earthquake to consume and overwhelm,
And reign in ruin. Phrygian Olympus,
Tmolus, and Latmos, and Mycale, roughen
With horrent arms; and lofty ships even now,
Like vapours anchored to a mountain’s edge,
285 Freighted with fire and whirlwind, wait at Scala
The convoy of the ever-veering wind.
Samos is drunk with blood;—the Greek has paid
Brief victory with swift loss and long despair.
The false Moldavian serfs fled fast and far,
290 When the fierce shout of ‘Allah-illa-Allah!’
Rose like the war-cry of the northern wind
Which kills the sluggish clouds, and leaves a flock
Of wild swans struggling with the naked storm.
So were the lost Greeks on the Danube’s day!
295 If night is mute, yet the returning sun
Kindles the voices of the morning birds;
Nor at thy bidding less exultingly
Than birds rejoicing in the golden day,
The Anarchies of Africa unleash
300 Their tempest-wingèd cities of the sea,
To speak in thunder to the rebel world.
Like sulphurous clouds, half-shattered by the storm,
They sweep the pale Aegean, while the Queen
Of Ocean, bound upon her island-throne,
305 Far in the West, sits mourning that her sons
Who frown on Freedom spare a smile for thee:
Russia still hovers, as an eagle might
Within a cloud, near which a kite and crane
Hang tangled in inextricable fight,
310 To stoop upon the victor;—for she fears
The name of Freedom, even as she hates thine.
But recreant Austria loves thee as the Grave
Loves Pestilence, and her slow dogs of war
Fleshed with the chase, come up from Italy,
315 And howl upon their limits; for they see
The panther, Freedom, fled to her old cover,
Amid seas and mountains, and a mightier brood
Crouch round. What Anarch wears a crown or mitre,
Or bears the sword, or grasps the key of gold,
320 Whose friends are not thy friends, whose foes thy foes?
Our arsenals and our armouries are full;
Our forts defy assault; ten thousand cannon
Lie ranged upon the beach, and hour by hour
Their earth-convulsing wheels affright the city;
325 The galloping of fiery steeds makes pale
The Christian merchant; and the yellow Jew
Hides his hoard deeper in the faithless earth.
Like clouds, and like the shadows of the clouds,
Over the hills of Anatolia,
330 Swift in wide troops the Tartar chivalry
Sweep;—the far flashing of their starry lances
Reverberates the dying light of day.
We have one God, one King, one Hope, one Law;
335 Divided in itself, and soon must fall.
Mahmud. Proud words, when deeds come short, are seasonable:
Look, Hassan, on yon crescent moon, emblazoned
Upon that shattered flag of fiery cloud
Which leads the rear of the departing day;
340 Wan emblem of an empire fading now!
See how it trembles in the blood-red air,
And like a mighty lamp whose oil is spent
Shrinks on the horizon’s edge, while, from above,
One star with insolent and victorious light
345 Hovers above its fall, and with keen beams,
Like arrows through a fainting antelope,
Strikes its weak form to death.
Hassan. Even as that moon
Renews itself—–
Mahmud. Shall we be not renewed!
Far other bark than ours were needed now
350 To stem the torrent of descending time:
The Spirit that lifts the slave before his lord
Stalks through the capitals of armèd kings,
And spreads his ensign in the wilderness:
Exults in chains; and, when the rebel falls,
355 Cries like the blood of Abel from the dust;
And the inheritors of the earth, like beasts
When earthquake is unleashed, with idiot fear
Cower in their kingly dens—as I do now.
What were Defeat when Victory must appal?
360 Or Danger, when Security looks pale?—
How said the messenger—who, from the fort
Islanded in the Danube, saw the battle
Of Bucharest?—that—
Hassan. Ibrahim’s scimitar
Drew with its gleam swift victory from Heaven,
365 To burn before him in the night of battle—
A light and a destruction.
Mahmud. Ay! the day
Was ours: but how?—–
Hassan. The light Wallachians,
The Arnaut, Servian, and Albanian allies
Fled from the glance of our artillery
370 Almost before the thunderstone alit.
One half the Grecian army made a bridge
Of safe and slow retreat, with Moslem dead;
The other—
Mahmud. Speak—tremble not,—