Here, where the Roman million's blame or praise Was death or life, the playthings of a crowd, My voice sounds much-and fall the stars' faint rays On the arena void-seats crush'd-walls bow'dAnd galleries, where my steps seem echoes strangely loud.

A ruin-yet what ruin! from its mass
Walls, palaces, half-cities, have been rear'd;
Yet oft the enormous skeleton ye pass,
And marvel where the spoil could have appear'd.
Hath it indeed been plunder'd, or but clear'd?
Alas! developed, opens the decay,

When the colossal fabric's form is near'd:

It will not bear the brightness of the day,

Which streams too much on all years, man, have reft away.

But when the rising moon begins to climb

Its topmost arch, and gently pauses there;

When the stars twinkle through the loops of time,
And the low night-breeze waves along the air
The garland-forest, which the gray walls wear,
Like laurels on the bald first Cæsar's head;
When the light shines serene but doth not glare,
Then in this magic circle raise the dead:

Heroes have trod this spot-'tis on their dust ye tread.

CHILDE HAROLD.-Canto IV.

THE LAOCOÖN AND APOLLO BELVEDERE.

43

133

THE LAOCOÖN AND APOLLO BELVEDERE.

OR, turning to the Vatican, go see
Laocoön's torture dignifying pain—
A father's love and mortal's agony

With an immortal's patience blending: Vain
The struggle; vain, against the coiling strain
And gripe, and deepening of the dragon's grasp,
The old man's clench; the long envenom'd chain
Rivets the living links,—the enormous asp
Enforces pang on pang, and stifles gasp on gasp.

Or view the Lord of the unerring bow,
The God of life, and poesy, and light—
The Sun in human limbs array'd, and brow
All radiant from his triumph in the fight;
The shaft hath just been shot-the arrow bright
With an immortal's vengeance: in his eye
And nostril beautiful disdain, and might
And majesty, flash their full lightnings by,
Developing in that one glance the Deity.

But in his delicate form-a dream of Love,
Shaped by some solitary nymph, whose breast
Long'd for a deathless lover from above,
And madden'd in that vision—are exprest
All that ideal beauty ever bless'd

The mind with in its most unearthly mood,
When each conception was a heavenly guest—
A ray of immortality-and stood,

Starlike, around, until they gather'd to a god!

And if it be Prometheus stole from Heaven The fire which we endure, it was repaid By him to whom the energy was given Which this poetic marble hath array'd With an eternal glory-which, if made By human hands, is not of human thought; And Time himself hath hallow'd it, nor laid One ringlet in the dust-nor hath it caught A tinge of years, but breathes the flame with which 'twas wrought.

*

CHILDE HAROLD.-Canto IV.

THE OCEAN.

THERE is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel

What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean—roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin-his control
Stops with the shore; upon the watery plain

* Prometheus is said in Greek legends to have stolen fire from heaven, which some, with Lord Byron, suppose to typify the fire of the mind. The meaning of the poet is, that if man was indebted for this fire to heaven, the expression with which the sculptor of the Apollo had endowed one of its gods was a repayment in kind.

The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,

When, for a moment, like a drop of rain,

He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan, Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown.

His steps are not upon thy paths,―thy fields
Are not a spoil for him,-thou dost arise
And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields
For earth's destruction thou dost all despise,
Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,
And send'st him, shivering in thy playful spray
And howling, to his Gods, where haply lies
His petty hope in some near port or bay,

And dashest him again to earth :-there let him lay.

The armaments which thunderstrike the walls
Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake,
And monarchs tremble in their capitals,
The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make
Their clay creator the vain title take
Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war,—
These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake,
They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar
Alike the Armada's pride or spoils of Trafalgar.

Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee— Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they? Thy waters wash'd them power while they were free, And many a tyrant since; their shores obey The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay Has dried up realms to deserts :—not so thou ;Unchangeable, save to thy wild waves' play, Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow; Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now.

Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form
Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,—

Calm or convulsed, in breeze or gale or storm,
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime
Dark-heaving-boundless, endless, and sublime,
The image of eternity, the throne

Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime
The monsters of the deep are made; each zone
Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.

And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy
Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be
Borne, like thy bubbles, onward: from a boy
I wanton'd with thy breakers-they to me
Were a delight; and if the freshening sea
Made them a terror-'twas a pleasing fear,
For I was as it were a child of thee,
And trusted to thy billows far and near,
And laid my hand upon thy mane-as I do here.

CHILDE HAROLD.-Canto IV.

MODERN GREECE.

HE who hath bent him o'er the dead

Ere the first day of death is fled,
The first dark day of nothingness,

The last of danger and distress,
(Before Decay's effacing fingers

Have swept the lines where beauty lingers,)

And mark'd the mild angelic air,

The rapture of repose that's there,
The fix'd yet tender traits that streak

The languor of the placid cheek,