The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,

And they were enemies: they met beside

The dying embers of an altar-place

Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things

For an unholy usage; they raked up,

And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath

Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld

Each other's aspects -saw, and shriek'd, and died
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless
A lump of death —a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,

And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp'd
They slept on the abyss without a surge

The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon, their mistress, had expired before;
The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them - She was the Universe.1

Diodati, July, 1816.

["Darkness" is a grand and gloomy sketch of the supposed consequences of the final extinction of the Sun and the heavenly bodies; executed, undoubtedly, with great and fearful force, but with something of German exaggeration, and a fantastical solution of incidents. The very conception is terrible above all conception of known calamity, and is too oppressive to the imagination to be contemplated with pleasure, even in the faint reflection of poetry.-JEFFREY.]

CHURCHILL'S GRAVE;

A FACT LITERALLY RENDERED. I

I STOOD beside the grave of him who blazed
The comet of a season, and I saw
The humblest of all sepulchres, and gazed
With not the less of sorrow and of awe
On that neglected turf and quiet stone,
With name no clearer than the names unknown,
Which lay unread around it; and I ask'd

The Gardener of that ground, why it might be
That for this plant strangers his memory task'd,

Through the thick deaths of half a century;
And thus he answer'd -"Well, I do not know
Why frequent travellers turn to pilgrims so;
He died before my day of Sextonship,

And I had not the digging of this grave."
And is this all? I thought, and do we rip
The veil of Immortality, and crave

I know not what of honour and of light
Through unborn ages, to endure this blight,
So soon, and so successless? As I said,
The Architect of all on which we tread,

1 [On the sheet containing the original draught of these lines Lord Byron has written:-" The following poem (as most that I have endeavoured to write) is founded on a fact; and this detail is an attempt at a serious imitation of the style of a great poetits beauties and its defects: I say, the style; for the thoughts I claim as my own. In this, if there be anything ridiculous, let it be attributed to me, at least as much as to Mr. Wordsworth; of whom there can exist few greater admirers than myself. I have blended what I would deem to be the beauties as well as defects of his style; and it ought to be remembered, that, in such things whether there be praise or dispraise, there is always what is called a compliment, however unintentional."]

For Earth is but a tombstone, did essay
To extricate remembrance from the clay,

Whose minglings might confuse a Newton's thought,
Were it not that all life must end in one,

Of which we are but dreamers; - as he caught
As 'twere the twilight of a former Sun,

Thus spoke he,

"I believe the man of whom

You wot, who lies in this selected tomb,

Was a most famous writer in his day,

And therefore travellers step from out their way
To pay him honour, — and myself whate'er

Your honour pleases: "-then most pleased I shook 1
From out my pocket's avaricious nook

Some certain coins of silver, which as 'twere
Perforce I gave this man, though I could spare
So much but inconveniently: — Ye smile,
I see ye, ye profane ones! all the while,
Because my homely phrase the truth would tell.
You are the fools, not I for I did dwell

With a deep thought, and with a soften'd eye,
On that Old Sexton's natural homily,
In which there was Obscurity and Fame,
The Glory and the Nothing of a Name.2

1 [Originally

Diodati, 1816.

"then most pleased, I shook

My inmost pocket's most retired nook,
And out fell five and sixpence."]

2 ["The Grave of Churchill might have called from Lord Byron a deeper commemoration; for, though they generally differed in character and genius, there was a resemblance between their history and character. The satire of Churchill flowed with a more profuse, though not a more embittered, stream; while, on the other hand, he cannot be compared to Lord Byron in point of tenderness or imagination. But both these poets held themselves above the opinion of the world, and both were followed by the fame and popularity which they seemed to despise. The writings of both exhibit an irborn, though sometimes ill-regu.

PROMETHEUS.

I.

TITAN! to whose immortal eyes
The sufferings of mortality,
Seen in their sad reality,

Were not as things that gods despise;
What was thy pity's recompense?
A silent suffering, and intense;
The rock, the vulture, and the chain,
All that the proud can feel of pain,
The agony they do not show,
The suffocating sense of woe,

Which speaks but in its loneliness,
And then is jealous lest the sky
Should have a listener, nor will sigh
Until its voice is echoless.

II.

Titan! to thee the strife was given
Between the suffering and the will,
Which torture where they cannot kill;
And the inexorable Heaven,

lated, generosity of mind, and a spirit of proud independence, frequently pushed to extremes. Both carried their hatred of hypocrisy beyond the verge of prudence, and indulged their vein of satire to the borders of licentiousness. Both died in the flower of their age in a foreign land."- SIR WALTER SCOTT.- Churchill died at Boulogne, November 4, 1764, in the thirty-third year of his age." Though his associates obtained Christian burial for him, by bringing the body to Dover, where it was interred in the old cemetery which once belonged to the collegiate church of St. Martin, they inscribed upon his tombstone, instead of any consolatory or monitory text, this Epicurean line from one of his own poems

"Life to the last enjoy'd, here Churchill lies." -Southey's Life of Cowper, vol. ii. p. 159]

And the deaf tyranny of Fate,
The ruling principle of Hate,
Which for its pleasure doth create
The things it may annihilate,
Refused thee even the boon to die :
The wretched gift eternity

Was thine - and thou hast borne it well.
All that the Thunderer wrung from thee
Was but the menace which flung back
On him the torments of thy rack;
The fate thou didst so well foresee,
But would not to appease him tell;
And in thy Silence was his Sentence,
And in his Soul a vain repentance,
And evil dread so ill dissembled,
That in his hand the lightnings trembled.

III.

Thy Godlike crime was to be kind,
To render with thy precepts less

The sum of human wretchedness,
And strengthen Man with his own mind;
But baffled as thou wert from high,

Still in thy patient energy,

In the endurance, and repulse

Of thine impenetrable Spirit,

Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse,

A mighty lesson we inherit :

Thou art a symbol and a sign

To Mortals of their fate and force;

Like thee, Man is in part divine,

A troubled stream from a pure source;

And Man in portions can foresee
His own funereal destiny;