LXXXV. Thus, usually, when he was ask'd to sing, He gave the different nations something national; From the high lyrical to the low rational : LXXXVI. In France, for instance, he would write a chanson; In Spain, he 'd make a ballad or romance on The last war-much the same in Portugal; In Germany, the Pegasus he 'd prance on Would be old Goethe's (see what says de Staël); In Italy, he'd ape the "Trecentisti ;" In Greece, he 'd sing some sort of hymn like this t' ye. The isles of Greece! the isles of Greece! The Scian and the Teian muse, The mountains look on Marathon, And musing there an hour alone, I dream'd that Greece might still be free; For, standing on the Persians' grave, A king sat on the rocky brow Which looks o'er sea-born Salamis ; And men in nations;-all were his ! And where are they? and where art thou, My country? On thy voiceless shore The heroic lay is tuneless now The heroic bosom beats no more! And must thy lyre, so long divine, Degenerate into hands like mine? 'T is something, in the dearth of fame, Must we but weep o'er days more bless'd? What! silent still? and silent all? Ah! no;-the voices of the dead Sound like a distant torrent's fall, And answer, "Let one living head, But one arise, we come, we come!" 'Tis but the living who are dumb. In vain-in vain: strike other chords; And shed the blood of Scio's vine! You have the Pyrrhic dance as yet, The nobler and the manlier one? Fill high the bowl with Samian wine! We will not think of themes like these! It made Anacreon's song divine : He served—but served Polycrates— A tyrant; but our masters then Were still, at least, our countrymen. The tyrant of the Chersonese Was freedom's best and bravest friend; Oh! that the present hour would lend Such chains as his were sure to bind. Fill high the bowl with Samian wine! Such as the Doric mothers bore; Trust not for freedom to the Franks- The only hope of courage dwells ; Fill high the bowl with Samian wine! Place me on Sunium's marbled steep Where nothing, save the waves and I, LXXXVII. Thus sung, or would, or could, or should have sung, If not like Orpheus quite, when Greece was young, Of others' feeling; but they are such liars, LXXXVIII. But words are things, and a small drop of ink, Of ages to what straits old Time reduces LXXXIX. And when his bones are dust, his grave a blank, Or graven stone found in a harrack's station, XC. And glory long has made the sages smile; 'T is something, nothing, words, illusion, windDepending more upon the historian's style Than on the name a person leaves behind. XCI. Milton 's the prince of poets-so we say; A little heavy, but no less divine; An independent being in his day— Learn'd, pious, temperate in love and wine; But his life falling into Johnson's way, We 're told this great high priest of all the Nine Was whipt at college,—a harsh sire-odd spouse, XCII. All these are, certes, entertaining facts, Like Shakspeare's stealing deer, Lord Bacon's bribes ; Like Titus' youth, and Cæsar's earliest acts; Like Burns (whom Doctor Currie well describes); As most essential to their hero's story, XCIII., All are not moralists like Southey, when He prated to the world of "Pantisocracy;" Or Wordsworth unexcised, unhired, who then Season'd his pedlar poems with democracy; Or Coleridge, long before his flighty pen Let to the Morning Post its aristocracy ; When he and Southey, following the same path, Espoused two partners (milliners of Bath). XCIV. Such names at present cut a convict figure, Are good manure for their more bare biography. XCV. He there builds up a formidable dike Between his own and others' intellect ; But Wordsworth's poem, and his followers, like Joanna Southcote's Shiloh and her sect, Are things which in this century don't strike The public mind, so few are the elect; And the new births of both their stale virginities Have proved but dropsies, taken for divinities. XCVI. But let me to my story: I must own, While I soliloquize beyond expression ; The world, not quite so great as Ariosto. XCVII. I know that what our neighbours call "longueurs” (We 've not so good a word, but have the thing In that complete perfection which ensures An epic from Bob Southey every spring)Form not the true temptation which allures The reader; but 't would not be hard to bring Some fine examples of the epopee, To prove its grand ingredient is ennui. |