Spire, vaults, the shrine, the spoil, the slain, The turbaned victors, the Christian band, All that of living or dead remain, Hurled on high with the shivered fane, In one wild roar expired! The shattered town-the walls thrown down The waves a moment backward bent— The hills that shake, although unrent, As if an earthquake passed— The thousand shapeless things all driven By that tremendous blast Proclaimed the desperate conflict o'er On that too long afflicted shore: Up to the sky like rockets go Many a tall and goodly man, Scorched and shrivelled to a span, When he fell to earth again Like a cinder strewed the plain: ,975 980 985 Down the ashes shower like rain; Some fell in the gulf, which received the sprinkles With a thousand circling wrinkles; 990 Some fell on the shore, but, far away, Scattered o'er the isthmus lay; Christian or Moslem, which be they? Let their mothers see and say! When in cradled rest they lay, And each nursing mother smiled On the sweet sleep of her child, Little deemed she such a day Would rend those tender limbs away. 995 1000 The wild birds flew ; the wild dogs fled, And howling left the unburied dead; 1015 The camels from their keepers broke; The nearer steed plunged o'er the plain, ΤΟ 1020 1025 And made him higher soar and shriek Thus was Corinth lost and won! NOTES. Note 1, page 9, line 3. The Turcoman hath left his herd. The life of the Turcomans is wandering and patriarchal : they dwell in tents. Coumourgi-he whose closing scene. Ali Coumourgi, the favourite of three sultans, and Grand Vizier to Achmet III. after recovering Peloponnesus from the Venetians in one campaign, was mortally wounded in the next, against the Germans, at the battle of Peterwaradin, (in the plain of Carlowitz) in Hungary, endeavouring to rally his guards. He died of his wounds next day. His last order was the decapitation of General Breuner, and some other German prisoners; and his last words, "Oh that I could thus serve all the Christian dogs!" a speech and act not unlike one of Caligula. He was a young man of great ambition and unbounded presumption: on being told that Prince Eugene, then opposed to him, " was a great general," he said, " I shall become a greater, and at his expense." Note 3, page 24, line 15. There shrinks no ebb in that tideless sea. The reader need hardly be reminded that there are no perceptible tides in the Mediterranean. Note 4, page 26, line 5. And their white tusks crunched o'er the whiter skull. This spectacle I have seen, such as described, beneath the wall of the Seraglio at Constantinople, in the little cavities worn by the Bosphorus in the rock, a narrow terrace of which projects between the wall and the water. I think the fact is also mentioned in Hobhouse's Travels. were probably those of some refractory Janizaries. Note 5, page 26, line 14.` The bodies And each scalp had a single long tuft of hair. This tuft, or long lock, is left from a superstition that Mahomet will draw them into Paradise by it. Note 6, page 29, line 3. I must here acknowledge a close, though unintentional, resemblance in these twelve lines to a passage in an unpublished poem of Mr. Coleridge, called "Christabel.". It was not till after these lines were written that I heard that wild and singularly original and beautiful poem recited; and the MS. of that production I never saw till very recently, by the kindness of Mr. Coleridge himself, who, I hope, is convinced that I have not been a wilful plagiarist. The original idea undoubtedly pertains to Mr. Coleridge, whose poem has been composed above fourteen years. Let me conclude by a hope that he will not longer delay the publication of a production, of which I can only add my mite of approbation to the applause of far more competent judges. Note 7, page 34, line 18. There is a light cloud by the moon I have been told that the idea expressed from lines 597 to |