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XCV.

Thou too art gone, thou loved and lovely one!
Whom Youth and Youth's affections bound to me;

Who did for me what none beside have done,
Nor shrank from one albeit unworthy thee.

What is my Being! thou hast ceased to be!

Nor staid to welcome here thy wanderer home,

Who mourns o'er hours which we no more shall seeWould they had never been, or were to come! Would he had ne'er returned to find fresh cause to roam !11

XCVI.

Oh! ever loving, lovely, and beloved!

How selfish Sorrow ponders on the past,
And clings to thoughts now better far removed!
But Time shall tear thy shadow from me last."

All thou couldst have of mine, stern Death! thou hast ;
The Parent, Friend, and now the more than Friend:
Ne'er yet for one thine arrows flew so fast,2

And grief with grief continuing still to blend,

Hath snatched the little joy that Life had yet to lend.

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ii. But Time the Comforter shall come at last.-[MS. erased.]

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"The 'he' refers to 'Wanderer' and anything is better than I I I I always I.

[4th Revise B.M.]

"Yours,

"BYRON."

2. [Compare Young's Night Thoughts ("The Complaint," Night i.). Vide ante, p. 95.1

VOL. II.

M

XCVII.

Then must I plunge again into the crowd,
And follow all that Peace disdains to seek?
Where Revel calls, and Laughter, vainly loud,
False to the heart, distorts the hollow cheek,
To leave the flagging spirit doubly weak;
Still o'er the features, which perforce they cheer,
To feign the pleasure or conceal the pique:
Smiles form the channel of a future tear,

Or raise the writhing lip with ill-dissembled sneer.

XCVIII.

What is the worst of woes that wait on Age?

What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow?
To view each loved one blotted from Life's page,
And be alone on earth, as I am now.

Before the Chastener humbly let me bow,
O'er Hearts divided and o'er Hopes destroyed:
Roll on, vain days! full reckless may ye flow,
Since Time hath reft whate'er my soul enjoyed,
And with the ills of Eld mine earlier years alloyed.

I.

i. Though Time not yet hath ting'd my locks with snow,'
Yet hath he reft whate'er my soul enjoy'd.—[D.]

"To Mr. Dallas.

i.

"If Mr. D. wishes me to adopt the former line so be it. I prefer the other I confess, it has less egotism-the first sounds affected.

"Yours,

"B."

[Dallas assented, and directed the printer to let the Roll stand.]

[NOTE.-The MS. closes with stanza xcii. Stanzas xciii.

xcviii. were added after Childe Harold was in the press. Byron sent them to Dallas, October 11, 1811, and, apparently, on the same day composed the Epistle to a Friend (F. Hodgson) in answer to some lines exhorting the Author to be cheerful, and to "Banish Care," and the first poem To Thyrza ("Without a stone to mark the Spot "). "I have sent," he writes, "two or three additional stanzas for both 'Fyttes. I have been again shocked with a death, and have lost one very dear to me in happier times; but I have almost forgot the taste of grief,' and 'supped full of horrors' till I have become callous, nor have I a tear left for an event which, five years ago, would have bowed down my head to the earth. It seems as though I were to experience in my youth the greatest misery of age. My friends fall around me, and I shall be left a lonely tree before I am withered." In one respect he would no longer disclaim identity with Childe Harold. "Death had deprived him of his nearest connections." He had seen his friends "around him fall like leaves in wintry weather." He felt "like one deserted ;" and in the "dusky shadow" of that early desolation he was destined to walk till his life's end. It is not without cause when "a man of great spirit grows melancholy."

In connection with this subject, it may be noted that lines 6 and 7 of stanza xcv. do not bear out Byron's contention to Dallas (Letters, October 14 and 31, 1811), that in these three in memoriam stanzas (ix., xcv., xcvi.) he is bewailing an event which took place after he returned to Newstead. The "more than friend" had "ceased to be" before the "wanderer returned. It is evident that Byron did not take Dallas into his confidence.]

NOTES

ΤΟ

CHILDE HAROLD'S

PILGRIMAGE.

CANTO II.

I.

Despite of War and wasting fire.

Stanza i. line 4.

PART of the Acropolis was destroyed by the explosion of a magazine during the Venetian siege.

[In 1684, when the Venetian Armada threatened Athens, the Turks removed the Temple of Victory, and made use of the materials for the construction of a bastion. In the autumn of 1687, when the city was besieged by the Venetians under Francesco Morosini (1618-1694; Doge of Venice, 1688), "mortars were planted . . . near the north-east corner of the rock, which threw their shells at a high angle, with a low charge, into the Acropolis. . . . On the 25th of September, a Venetian bomb blew up a small powder-magazine in the Propylæa, and on the following evening another fell in the Parthenon, where the Turks had deposited . . . a considerable quantity of powder. . . . A terrific explosion took place; the central columns of the peristyle, the walls of the cella, and the immense architraves and cornices they supported, were scattered around the remains of the temple. The Propylæa had been partly destroyed in 1656 by the explosion of a magazine which was struck by lightning."-Finlay's History of Greece, 1887, i. 185.]

2.

But worse than steel, and flame, and ages slow,
Is the dread sceptre and dominion dire.

Stanza i. lines 6, 7.

We can all feel, or imagine, the regret with which the ruins of cities, once the capitals of empires, are beheld: the

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