2.

What are garlands and crowns to the brow that is wrinkled?

'Tis but as a dead flower with May-dew besprinkled : Then away with all such from the head that is hoary, What care I for the wreaths that can only give glory?

3.

Oh FAME!-if I e'er took delight in thy praises,
"Twas less for the sake of thy high-sounding phrases,
Than to see the bright eyes of the dear One discover,
She thought that I was not unworthy to love her.

4.

There chiefly I sought thee, there only I found thee; Her Glance was the best of the rays that surround thee, When it sparkled o'er aught that was bright in my story, I knew it was Love, and I felt it was Glory.

November 6, 1821. [First published, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, 1830, ii. 566, note.]

STANZAS TO A HINDOO AIR.1

I.

OH! my lonely-lonely-lonely-Pillow!
Where is my lover? where is my lover?
Is it his bark which my dreary dreams discover?
Far far away! and alone along the billow?

2.

Oh my lonely-lonely-lonely-Pillow !

Why must my head ache where his gentle brow lay?

1. [These verses were written by Lord Byron a little before he left Italy for Greece. They were meant to suit the Hindostanee air, “Alla Malla Punca," which the Countess Guiccioli was fond of singing.Editor's note, Works, etc., xiv. 357, Pisa, September, 1821.]

How the long night flags lovelessly and slowly,
And my head droops over thee like the willow!

3.

Oh! thou, my sad and solitary Pillow!

Send me kind dreams to keep my heart from breaking, In return for the tears I shed upon thee waking;

Let me not die till he comes back o'er the billow.

4.

Then if thou wilt-no more my lonely Pillow, In one embrace let these arms again enfold him, And then expire of the joy-but to behold him! Oh! my lone bosom !-oh! my lonely Pillow!

[First published, Works of Lord Byron, 1832, xiv. 357-)

TO

1.

BUT once I dared to lift my eyes—

To lift my eyes to thee;

And since that day, beneath the skies,
No other sight they see.

2.

In vain sleep shuts them in the night-
The night grows day to me;
Presenting idly to my sight
What still a dream must be.

3.

A fatal dream-for many a bar
Divides thy fate from mine;
And still my passions wake and war,

But peace be still with thine.

[First published, New Monthly Magazine, 1833, vol. 37, p. 308.]

1. [Probably "To Lady Blessington," who includes them in her Conversations of Lord Byron.]

TO THE COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON.

I.

You have asked for a verse :-
:-the

request

In a rhymer 'twere strange to deny ;
But my Hippocrene was but my breast,
And my feelings (its fountain) are dry.

2.

Were I now as I was, I had sung

What Lawrence has painted so well;'
But the strain would expire on my tongue,
And the theme is too soft for my shell.

3.

I am ashes where once I was fire,
And the bard in my bosom is dead;
What I loved I now merely admire,
And my heart is as grey as my head.

4.

My Life is not dated by years

There are moments which act as a plough,

And there is not a furrow appears

But is deep in my soul as my brow.

5.

Let the young and the brilliant aspire

To sing what I gaze on in vain ;

For Sorrow has torn from my lyre

The string which was worthy the strain.

B.

[First published, Letters and Journals, 1830, ii. 635, 636.]

1. [For reproduction of Lawrence's portrait of Lady Blessington, see

List of Illustrations," Letters, 1901, v. [xv.].]

ARISTOMENES.1

CANTO FIRST.

I.

THE Gods of old are silent on their shore.

Since the great Pan expired, and through the roar
Of the Ionian waters broke a dread

Voice which proclaimed "the Mighty Pan is dead."
How much died with him! false or true-the dream
Was beautiful which peopled every stream
With more than finny tenants, and adorned

The woods and waters with coy nymphs that scorned
Pursuing Deities, or in the embrace

Of gods brought forth the high heroic race
Whose names are on the hills and o'er the seas.

ΙΟ

Cephalonia, Sept. 10th 1823. [From an autograph MS. in the possession of the Lady Dorchester, now for the first time printed.]

1. [Aristomenes, the Achilles of the Alexandrian poet Rhianus (Grote's History of Greece, 1869, ii. 428), is the legendary hero of the second Messenian War (B.C. 685-668). Thrice he slew a hundred of the Spartan foe, and thrice he offered the Hekatomphonia on Mount Ithome. His name was held in honour long after "the rowers on their benches" heard the wail, "Pan, Pan is dead!" At the close of the second century of the Christian era, Pausanias (iv. 16. 4) made a note of Messenian maidens hymning his victory over the Lacedæmonians— "From the heart of the plain he drove them, And he drove them back to the hill:

To the top of the hill he drove them,

As he followed them, followed them still!"

Byron was familiar with Thomas Taylor's translation of the Periegesis Græcia (vide ante, p. 109, and "Observations," etc., Letters, v. Appendix III. p. 574), and with Mitford's Greece (Don Juan, Canto XII. stanza xix. line 7). Hence his knowledge of Aristomenes. The thought expressed in lines 5-11 was, possibly, suggested by Coleridge's translation of the famous passage in Schiller's Piccolomini (act ii. sc. 4, lines 118, sq., For fable is Love's world, his home," etc.), which is quoted by Sir Walter Scott, in the third chapter of Guy Mannering.]

THE BLUES:

A LITERARY ECLOGUE.

Nimium ne crede colori."-VIRGIL, [Ecl. ii. 17].

O trust not, ye beautiful creatures, to hue,

Though your hair were as red, as your stockings are blue.