The better days of life were ours; The worst can be but mine : The sun that cheers, the storm that lowers, The silence of that dreamless sleep That all those charms have pass'd away; The flower in ripen'd bloom unmatch'd I know not if I could have borne The night that follow'd such a morn Thy day without a cloud hath pass'd, As stars that shoot along the sky As once I wept, if I could weep, To gaze, how fondly! on thy face, Yet how much less it were to gain, And more thy buried love endears February, 1812. IF SOMETIMES IN THE HAUNTS OF MEN. Ir sometimes in the haunts of men Thine image from my breast may fade, The lonely hour presents again The semblance of thy gentle shade: Oh, pardon that in crowds awhile 1812.] And, self-condemn'd, appear to smile, If not the goblet pass unquaff'd, From all her troubled visions free, For wert thou vanish'd from my mind, Where could my vacant bosom turn? For well I know, that such had been A blessing never meant for me; Thou wert too like a dream of Heaven, March 14. 1812. ON A CORNELIAN HEART WHICH WAS BROKEN.1 ILL-FATED Heart! and can it be, That thou shouldst thus be rent in twain? Have years of care for thine and thee Alike been all employ'd in vain? Yet precious seems each shatter'd part, Since he who wears thee feels thou art March 16. 1812. FROM THE FRENCH. ÆGLE, beauty and poet, has two little crimes; She makes her own face, and does not make her rhymes. 1 [We know not whether the reader should understand the cornelian heart of these lines to be the same with that of which some notices are given in Vol. I. p. 95.] 83 LINES TO A LADY WEEPING.1 WEEP, daughter of a royal line, Weep for thy tears are Virtue's tears Repaid thee by thy people's smiles!? March, 1812. [This impromptu owed its birth to an on dit, that the late Princess Charlotte of Wales burst into tears on hearing that the Whigs had found it impossible to put together a cabinet, at the period of Mr. Perceval's death. They were appended to the first edition of the "Corsair," and excited a sensation, as it is called, marvellously disproportionate to their length,-or, we may add, their merit. The ministerial prints raved for two months on end, in the most foul-mouthed vituperation of the poet, and all that belonged to him-the Morning Post even announced a motion in the House of Lords" and all this," Lord Byron writes to Mr. Moore," as Bedreddin in the Arabian Nights remarks, for making a cream tart with pepper: how odd, that eight lines should have given birth, I really think, to eight thousand !"] 2 ["The Lines to a Lady weeping must go with the Corsair. I care nothing for consequences on this point. My politics are to me like a young mistress to an old man; the worse they grow, the fonder I become of them."-Lord B. to Mr. Murray, Jan. 22. 1814. "On my return, I find all the newspapers in hysterics, and town in an uproar, on the avowal and republication of two stanzas on Princess Charlotte's weeping at Regency's speech to Lauderdale in 1812. They are daily at it still: -some of the abuse good, -all of it hearty. They talk of a motion in our House upon it - be it so." Byron Diary, 1814.] |