CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE.

CANTO THE THIRD.

"Afin que cette application vous forçât de penser à autre chose ; il n'y a en vérité de remède que celui-là et le temps."- Lettre du Roi de Prusse à. D'Alembert, Sept. 7. 1776.

CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE.

CANTO THE THIRD. 1

I.

Is thy face like thy mother's, my fair child!
ADA! sole daughter of my house and heart? 2
When last I saw thy young blue eyes they smiled,
And then we parted, not as now we part,
But with a hope. ·

Awaking with a start,

The waters heave around me; and on high The winds lift up their voices: I depart, Whither I know not;3 but the hour's gone by, When Albion's lessening shores could grieve or glad

mine eye.

["Begun July 10th, 1816. Diodati, near Lake of Geneva.". MS.]

2 [In a hitherto unpublished letter, dated Verona, November 6. 1816, Lord Byron says" By the way, Ada's name (which I found in our pedigree, under king John's reign), is the same with that of the sister of Charlemagne, as I redde, the other day, in a book treating of the Rhine."]

3 [Lord Byron quitted England, for the second and last time, on the 25th of April, 1816, attended by William Fletcher and Robert Rushton, the " yeoman" and page" of Canto I.; his physician, Dr. Polidori; and a Swiss valet.]

II.

Once more upon the waters! yet once more!
And the waves bound beneath me as a steed
That knows his rider. 1 Welcome to the roar!
Swift be their guidance, wheresoe'er it lead !
Though the strain'd mast should quiver as a reed,
And the rent canvass fluttering strew the gale, 2
Still must I on; for I am as a weed,

Flung from the rock, on Ocean's foam to sail Where'er the surge may sweep, the tempest's breath prevail.

III.

In my youth's summer I did sing of One,
The wandering outlaw of his own dark mind;
Again I seize the theme, then but begun,
And bear it with me, as the rushing wind
Bears the cloud onwards: in that Tale I find
The furrows of long thought, and dried-up tears,
Which, ebbing, leave a sterile track behind,
O'er which all heavily the journeying years

Plod the last sands of life, where not a flower

appears.

[In the "Two Noble Kinsmen" of Beaumont and Fletcher, (a play to which the picture of passionate friendship delineated in the characters of Palamon and Arcite would be sure to draw the attention of Byron in his boyhood) we find the following passage :"Oh, never

Shall we two exercise, like twins of Honour,

Our arms again, and feel our fiery horses

Like proud seas under us."

Out of this somewhat forced simile, by a judicious transposition of the comparison, and by the substitution of the more definite word "waves" for "seas," Lord Byron's clear and noble thought has been produced. - MOORE.]

2

["And the rent canvass tattering."- MS.]