MAHMUD.

Thou art an adept in the difficult lore
Of Greek and Frank philosophy; thou numberest
The flowers, and thou measurest the stars;
Thou severest element from element;
Thy spirit is present in the past, and sees
The birth of this old world through all its cycles
Of desolation and of loveliness;

And when man was not, and how man became
The monarch and the slave of this low sphere,
And all its narrow circles-it is much.
I honour thee, and would be what thou art
Were I not what I am; but the unborn hour,
Cradled in fear and hope, conflicting storms,
Who shall unveil? Nor thou, nor I, nor any
Mighty or wise. I apprehend not
What thou hast taught me, but I now perceive
That thou art no interpreter of dreams;
Thou dost not own that art, device, or God,
Can make the future present-let it come!
Moreover thou disdainest us and ours!
Thou art as God, whom thou contemplatest.

AHASUERUS.

Disdain thee?-not the worm beneath my feet!
The Fathomless has care for meaner things
Than thou canst dream, and has made pride for
those

Who would be what they may not, or would seem
That which they are not. Sultan talk no more
Of thee and me, the future and the past;
But look on that which cannot change-the One
The unborn, and the undying. Earth and ocean,
Space, and the isles of life or light that gem
The sapphire floods of interstellar air,
This firmament pavilioned upon chaos,
With all its cressets of immortal fire,
Whose outwall, bastioned impregnably
Against the escape of boldest thoughts, repels them
As Calpe the Atlantic clouds-this whole
Of suns, and worlds, and men, and beasts, and
flowers,

With all the silent or tempestuous workings
By which they have been, are, or cease to be,
Is but a vision ;-all that it inherits
Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles, and dreams;
Thought is its cradle and its grave, nor less
The future and the past are idle shadows
Of thought's eternal flight-they have no being;
Nought is but that it feels itself to be.

Thou mayst now learn how the full tide of power
Ebbs to its depths.-Inheritor of glory,
Conceived in darkness, born in blood, and nourished
With tears and toil, thou seest the mortal throes
Of that whose birth was but the same. The Past
Now stands before thee like an Incarnation
Of the To-come; yet wouldst thou commune with
That portion of thyself which was ere thou
Didst start for this brief race whose crown is
death;

Dissolve with that strong faith and fervent passion
Which called it from the uncreated deep,
Yon cloud of war with its tempestuous phantoms
Of raging death; and draw with mighty will
The imperial shade hither.

[Exit AHASUERUS.

Have power on me! I see

As of the assault of an imperial city, The hiss of inextinguishable fire, The roar of giant cannon ;-the earthquaking Fall of vast bastions and precipitous towers, The shock of crags shot from strange engin❜ry, The clash of wheels, and clang of armed hoofs, And crash of brazen mail, as of the wreck Of adamantine mountains-the mad blast Of trumpets, and the neigh of raging steeds, And shrieks of women whose thrill jars the blood, And one sweet laugh, most horrible to hear, As of a joyous infant waked, and playing With its dead mother's breast; and now more loud The mingled battle-cry-ha! hear I not Ev TOUT vinn. Allah-illah-Allah!

Thence whither thou must go! The grave is fitter
To take the living, than give up the dead;
Yet has thy faith prevailed, and I am here.
The heavy fragments of the power which fell
When I arose, like shapeless crags and clouds,
Hang round my throne on the abyss, and voices
Of strange lament soothe my supreme repose,
Wailing for glory never to return.-

:

A later Empire nods in its decay; The autumn of a greener faith is come, And wolfish change, like winter, howls to strip The foliage in which Fame, the eagle, built Her aërie, while Dominion whelped below. The storm is in its branches, and the frost Is on its leaves, and the blank deep expects Oblivion on oblivion, spoil on spoil, Ruin on ruin thou art slow, my son; The Anarchs of the world of darkness keep A throne for thee, round which thine empire lies Boundless and mute; and for thy subjects thou, Like us, shall rule the ghosts of murdered life, The phantoms of the powers who rule thee nowMutinous passions and conflicting fears, And hopes that sate themselves on dust and die! Stript of their mortal strength, as thou of thine. Islam must fall, but we will reign together Over its ruins in the world of death :And if the trunk be dry, yet shall the seed Unfold itself even in the shape of that Which gathers birth in its decay. Woe! woe! To the weak people tangled in the grasp Of its last spasms.

Ask the cold pale Hour,

Rich in reversion of impending death,
When he shall fall upon whose ripe grey hairs
Sit care, and sorrow, and infirmity-

Weak lightning before darkness! poor faint smile
Of dying Islam! Voice which art the response
Of hollow weakness! Do I wake and live?
Were there such things? or may the unquiet brain,
Vexed by the wise mad talk of the old Jew,
Have shaped itself these shadows of its fear?
It matters not!-for nought we see or dream,
Possess, or lose, or grasp at, can be worth
More than it gives or teaches. Come what may,
The future must become the past, and I
As they were, to whom once this present hour,
This gloomy crag of time to which I cling,
Seemed an Elysian isle of peace and joy
Never to be attained -I must rebuke
This drunkenness of triumph ere it die,
And dying, bring despair.-Victory!—poor slaves!
[Exit MAHMUD.

VOICE WITHOUT.

Shout in the jubilee of death! The Greeks
Are as a brood of lions in the net,
Round which the kingly hunters of the earth
Stand smiling. Anarchs, ye whose daily food
Are curses, groans, and gold, the fruit of death,
From Thule to the girdle of the world,
Come, feast! the board groans with the flesh of men-
The cup is foaming with a nation's blood,
Famine and Thirst await: eat, drink, and die!

SEMICHORUS I.

Victorious Wrong, with vulture scream,
Salutes the risen sun, pursues the flying day!
I saw her ghastly as a tyrant's dream,
Perch on the trembling pyramid of night,
Beneath which earth and all her realms pavilioned
In visions of the dawning undelight.

Who shall impede her flight?
Who rob her of her prey?

VOICE WITHOUT.

Victory! victory! Russia's famished eagles Dare not to prey beneath the crescent's light. Impale the remnant of the Greeks! despoil! Violate! make their flesh cheaper than dust!

SEMICHORUS II.

Thou voice which art

The herald of the ill in splendour hid!
Thou echo of the hollow heart
Of monarchy, bear me to thine abode

[lay

Repulse, with plumes from conquest torn,
Led the ten thousand from the limits of the morn
Through many an hostile Anarchy!

At length they wept aloud and cried, "The sea! the sea!"

Through exile, persecution, and despair,

Rome was, and young Atlantis shall become The wonder, or the terror, or the tomb Of all whose step wakes power lulled in her savage lair:

But Greece was as a hermit child,

Whose fairest thoughts and limbs were built
To woman's growth, by dreams so mild
She knew not pain or guilt;

And now, O Victory, blush! and Empire, tremble,
When ye desert the free!

If Greece must be

SEMICHORUS II.

The young moon has fed

Her exhausted horn

With the sunset's fire:

The weak day is dead,

But the night is not born;

And, like loveliness panting with wild desire,
While it trembles with fear and delight,
Hesperus flies from awakening night,

And pants in its beauty and speed with light
Fast-flashing, soft, and bright.

Thou beacon of love! thou lamp of the free!
Guide us far, far away,

To climes where now, veiled by the ardour of day,
Thou art hidden

From waves on which weary noon
Faints in her summer swoon,
Between kingless continents, sinless as Eden,
Around mountains and islands inviolably
Prankt on the sapphire sea.

SEMICHORUS 1.

Through the sunset of hope,

Like the shapes of a dream,

What Paradise islands of glory gleam

Beneath Heaven's cope.

Their shadows more clear float by

The sound of their oceans, the light of their sky,

The music and fragrance their solitudes breathe, Burst like morning on dreams, or like Heaven on death,

Through the walls of our prison;

And Greece, which was dead, is arisen!

CHORUS.

The world's great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn:
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far;

A new Peneus rolls its fountains
Against the morning-star.

Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.

A loftier Argo cleaves the main,
Fraught with a later prize;
Another Orpheus sings again,

And loves, and weeps, and dies.
A new Ulysses leaves once more
Calypso for his native shore.

O write no more the tale of Troy,

If earth Death's scroll must be ! Nor mix with Laian rage the joy Which dawns upon the free: Although a subtler sphinx renew Riddles of death Thebes never knew.

Another Athens shall arise,

And to remoter time
Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,

The splendour of its prime;
And leave, if nought so bright may live,
All earth can take or heaven can give.

Saturn and Love their long repose

Shall burst, more bright and good Than all who fell, than One who rose, Than many unsubdued:

Not gold, not blood, their altar dowers, But votive tears, and symbol flowers.

O cease! must hate and death return {

Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn

Of bitter prophecy.

The world is weary of the past,
O might it die or rest at last!

N

P. 168, col. 1, 1. 20.

The quenchless ashes of Milan.

MILAN was the centre of the resistance of the bombard league against the Austrian tyrant. Frederick Barbarossa burnt the city to the ground, but liberty lived in its ashes, and it rose like an exhalation from its ruin.-See SISMONDI'S "Histoires des Républiques Italiennes," a book which has done much towards awakening the Italians to an imitation of their

great ancestors.

P. 169, col. 2, 1. 1. CHORUS.

The popular notions of Christianity are represented in this chorus as true in their relation to the worship they superseded, and that which in all probability they will supersede, without considering their merits in a relation more universal. The first stanza contrasts the immortality of the living and thinking beings which inhabit the planets, and, to use a common and inadequate phrase, clothe themselves in matter, with the transience of the noblest manifestations of the external world.

The concluding verses indicate a progressive state of more or less exalted existence, according to the degree of perfection which every distinct intelligence may have attained. Let it not be supposed that I mean to dogmatize upon a subject concerning which all men are equally ignorant, or that I think the Gordian knot of the origin of evil can be disentangled by that or any similar assertions. The received hypothesis of a Being resembling men in the moral attributes of his nature, having called us out of non-existence, and after inflicting on us the misery of the commission of error, should superadd that of the punishment and the privations consequent upon it, still would remain inexplicable and incredible. That there is a true solution of the riddle, and that in our present state the solution is unattainable by us, are propositions which may be regarded as equally certain; meanwhile, as it is the province of the poet to attach himself to those ideas which exalt and ennoble humanity, let him be permitted to have conjectured the condition of that futurity towards which we are all impelled by an inextinguishable thirst for immortality. Until better

arguments can be produced than sophisms which disgrace the cause, this desire itself must remain the strongest and the only presumption that eternity is the inheritance of every thinking being.

P. 169, col. 2, 1. 51.

No hoary priests after that Patriarch.

The Greek Patriarch, after having been compelled to fulminate an anathema against the insurgents, was put to death by the Turks.

P. 172, col. 2, 1.30.

The freeman of a western poet chief.

A Greek who had been Lord Byron's servant commands the insurgents in Attica. This Greek, Lord Byron informs me, though a poet and an enthusiastic patriot, gave him rather the idea of a timid and unenterprising person. It appears that circumstances make men what they are, and that we all contain the germ of a degree of degradation or greatness, whose connexion with our character is determined by events

P. 173, col. 1, 1. 10.

The Greeks expect a Saviour from the west.

It is reported that this Messiah had arrived at a seaport near Lacedemon in an American brig. The association of names and ideas is irresistibly ludicrous, but the prevalence of such a rumour strongly marks the state of popular enthusiasm in Greece.

P. 175, col 1, 1. 19.

The sound

As of the assault of an imperial city. For the vision of Mahmud of the taking of Constantinople in 1445, see Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. xii. p. 223.

The manner of the invocation of the spirit of Mahomet the Second will be censured as overdrawn. I could easily have made the Jew a regular conjuror, and the Phantom an ordinary ghost. I have preferred to represent the Jew as disclaiming all pretension, or even belief, in supernatural agency, and as tempting Mahmud to that state of mind in which ideas may be upposed to assume the force of sensation, through the confusion of thought, with the objects of thought, and excess of passion animating the creations of the imagination.

It is a sort of natural magic, susceptible of being exercised in a degree by any one who should have made himself master of the secret associations of another's thoughts.