OH Venice! Venice! when thy marble walls
Are level with the waters, there shall be
A cry of nations o'er thy sunken halls,
A loud lament along the sweeping sea!
If I, a northern wanderer, weep for thee,
What should thy sons do?-anything but weep:
And yet they only murmur in their sleep.
In contrast with their fathers-as the slime,
The dull green ooze of the receding deep,
Is with the dashing of the spring-tide foam,
That drives the sailor shipless to his home,
Are they to those that were; and thus they creep,
Crouching and crab-like, through their sapping streets.
Oh! agony-that centuries should reap
No mellower harvest! Thirteen hundred years 2
Of wealth and glory turned to dust and tears;
And every monument the stranger meets,
Church, palace, pillar, as a mourner greets;
And even the Lion all subdued appears,3
1. [The Ode on Venice (originally Ode) was completed by July 10, 1818 (Letters, 1900, iv. 245), but was published at the same time as Maseppa and A Fragment, June 28, 1819. The motif, a lamentation over the decay and degradation of Venice, re-echoes the sentiments expressed in the opening stanzas (i.-xix.) of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold. A realistic description of the Hour of Death" (lines 37-55), and a eulogy of the United States of America (lines 133-160), give distinction to the Ode.]
2. [Compare Childe Harold, Canto IV. stanza xiii. lines 4-6.] 3. [Compare ibid., stanza xi. lines 5-9.]
And the harsh sound of the barbarian drum,
With dull and daily dissonance, repeats
The echo of thy Tyrant's voice along
The soft waves, once all musical to song,
That heaved beneath the moonlight with the throng
Of gondolas 1-and to the busy hum
Of cheerful creatures, whose most sinful deeds
Were but the overbeating of the heart,
And flow of too much happiness, which needs
The aid of age to turn its course apart
From the luxuriant and voluptuous flood
Of sweet sensations, battling with the blood.
But these are better than the gloomy errors,
The weeds of nations in their last decay,
When Vice walks forth with her unsoftened terrors,
And Mirth is madness, and but smiles to slay;
And Hope is nothing but a false delay,
The sick man's lightning half an hour ere Death,
When Faintness, the last mortal birth of Pain,
And apathy of limb, the dull beginning
Of the cold staggering race which Death is winning, 40 Steals vein by vein and pulse by pulse away;
Yet so relieving the o'er-tortured clay,
To him appears renewal of his breath,
And freedom the mere numbness of his chain;
And then he talks of Life, and how again
He feels his spirit soaring-albeit weak,
And of the fresher air, which he would seek;
And as he whispers knows not that he gasps,
That his thin finger feels not what it clasps,
And so the film comes o'er him-and the dizzy
Chamber swims round and round-and shadows busy,
At which he vainly catches, flit and gleam,
Till the last rattle chokes the strangled scream,
And all is ice and blackness,-and the earth
That which it was the moment ere our birth.2
1. [Compare Childe Harold, Canto IV. stanza iii. lines 1-4.] 2. [Compare The Prisoner of Chillon, line 178, note 2, vide ante, p. 21.]
There is no hope for nations!-Search the page
Of many thousand years-the daily scene,
The flow and ebb of each recurring age,
The everlasting to be which hath been,
Hath taught us nought or little still we lean
On things that rot beneath our weight, and wear
Our strength away in wrestling with the air;
For 't is our nature strikes us down: the beasts
Slaughtered in hourly hecatombs for feasts
Are of as high an order-they must go
Even where their driver goads them, though to slaughter.
Ye men, who pour your blood for kings as water,
What have they given your children in return?
A heritage of servitude and woes,
A blindfold bondage, where your hire is blows.
What! do not yet the red-hot ploughshares burn,1
O'er which you stumble in a false ordeal,
And deem this proof of loyalty the real;
Kissing the hand that guides you to your scars,
And glorying as you tread the glowing bars?
All that your Sires have left you, all that Time
Bequeaths of free, and History of sublime,
Spring from a different theme!-Ye see and read,
Admire and sigh, and then succumb and bleed !
Save the few spirits who, despite of all,
And worse than all, the sudden crimes engendered
By the down-thundering of the prison-wall,
And thirst to swallow the sweet waters tendered,
Gushing from Freedom's fountains-when the crowd,'
Maddened with centuries of drought, are loud,
1. [In contrasting Sheridan with Brougham, Byron speaks of "the red-hot ploughshares of public life."-Diary, March 10, 1814, Letters, 1898, ii. 397.]
"At last it [the mob] takes to weapons such as men
Snatch when despair makes human hearts less pliant.
Then comes the tug of war; '-'t will come again,
I rather doubt; and I would fain say 'fie on't,'
If I had not perceived that revolution
Alone can save the earth from Hell's pollution."
Don Juan, Canto VIII. stanza li. lines 3-8.]
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