Where had been heaped 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 i

Each other's aspects-saw, and shrieked, 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 stirred within their silent depths;

Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,

grave,

60

70

And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropped
They slept on the abyss without a surge—
The waves were dead; the tides were in their
The Moon, their mistress, had expired before;
The winds were withered in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perished; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them-She was the Universe.

Diodati, July, 1816.

[First published, Prisoner of Chillon, etc., 1816.]

80

CHURCHILL'S GRAVE,'

A FACT LITERALLY RENDERED.3

I STOOD beside the grave of him who blazed
The Comet of a season, and I saw

1. [So, too, Vathek and Nouronihar, in the Hall of Eblis, waited "in direful suspense the moment which should render them to each other... objects of terror."-Vathek, by W. Beckford, 1887, p. 185.] 2. [Charles Churchill was born in February, 1731, and died at Boulogne, November 4, 1764. The body was brought to Dover and buried in the churchyard attached to the demolished church of St.

The humblest of all sepulchres, and gazed
With not the less of sorrow and of awe

Martin-le-Grand ("a small deserted cemetery in an obscure lane behind [i.e. above] the market"). See note by Charles De la Pryme, Notes and Queries, 1854, Series I. vol. x. p. 378). There is a tablet to his memory on the south wall of St. Mary's Church, and the present headstone in the graveyard (it was a "plain headstone" in 1816) bears the following inscription :

"1764.

Here lie the remains of the celebrated

C. CHURCHILL.

'Life to the last enjoy'd, here Churchill lies.'"

Churchill had been one of Byron's earlier models, and the following lines from The Candidate, which suggested the epitaph (lines 145-154), were, doubtless, familiar to him :

"Let one poor sprig of Bay around my head

Bloom whilst I live, and point me out when dead;

Let it (may Heav'n indulgent grant that prayer)

Be planted on my grave, nor wither there;

And when, on travel bound, some rhyming guest

Roams through the churchyard, whilst his dinner's drest,

Let it hold up this comment to his eyes;

Life to the last enjoy'd, here Churchill lies;

Whilst (O, what joy that pleasing flatt'ry gives)

Reading my Works he cries-here Churchill lives."

Byron spent Sunday, April 25, 1816, at Dover. He was to sail that night for Östend, and, to while away the time, "turned to Pilgrim" and thought out, perhaps began to write, the lines which were finished three months later at the Campagne Diodati.

"The Grave of Churchill," writes Scott (Quarterly Review, October, 1816), "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.. 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 inborn, though sometimes ill-regulated, 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."

Save for the affectation of a style which did not belong to him, and which in his heart he despised, Byron's commemoration of Churchill does not lack depth or seriousness. It was the parallel between their lives and temperaments which awoke reflection and sympathy, and prompted this "natural homily." Perhaps, too, the shadow of impending exile had suggested to his imagination that further parallel which Scott deprecated, and deprecated in vain, “death in the flower of his age, and in a foreign land.”]

3. [On the sheet containing the original draft 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 poet-its beauties and its

On that neglected turf and quiet stone,
With name no clearer than the names unknown,
Which lay unread around it; and I asked

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

Through the thick deaths of half a century; And thus he answered-" 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,1
The Architect of all on which we tread,
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,

ΙΟ

20

In this,

defects: I say the style; for the thoughts I claim as my own. 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.' There is, as Scott points out, a much closer resemblance to Southey's "English Eclogues, in which moral truths are expressed, to use the poet's own language, in an almost colloquial plainness of language,' and an air of quaint and original expression assumed, to render the sentiment at once impressive and piquant."]

1. [Compare

"

"The under-earth inhabitants—are they
But mingled millions decomposed to clay?"

A Fragment, lines 23, 24, vide post, p. 52. It is difficult to "extricate" the meaning of lines 19-25, but, perhaps, they are intended to convey a hope of immortality. "As I was speaking, the sexton (the architect) tried to answer my question by taxing his memory with regard to the occupants of the several tombs. He might well be puzzled, for Earth is but a tombstone,' covering an amalgam of dead bodies, and, unless in another life soul were separated from soul, as on earth body is distinct from body, Newton himself, who disclosed the turnpike-road through the unpaved stars' (Don Juan, Canto X. stanza ii. line would fail to assign its proper personality to

any given lump of clay."]

Of which we are but dreamers;—as he caught
As 'twere the twilight of a former Sun,1
Thus spoke he,-"I believe the man of whom
You wot, who lies in this selected 2 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

30

Your honour pleases: "-then most pleased I shook1
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 softened eye,
On that old Sexton's natural homily,
In which there was Obscurity and Fame,-
The Glory and the Nothing of a Name.

Diodati, 1816.

First published, Prisoner of Chillon, etc., 1816.]

40

"But here [i.e. in the realm of death '].all is

So shadowy and so full of twilight, that

It speaks of a day past."

Cain, act ii. sc. 2.]

2. ["Selected," that is, by "frequent travellers" (vide supra, line 12).] 3. Byron was a lover and worshipper of Prometheus as a boy. His first English exercise at Harrow was a paraphrase of a chorus of the Prometheus Vinctus of Eschylus, line 528, sq. (see Poetical Works, 1898, i. 14). Referring to a criticism on Manfred (Edinburgh Review,

Seen in their sad reality,

Were not as things that gods despise ;
What was thy pity's recompense ? 1
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.

10

II.

Titan! to thee the strife was given
Between the suffering and the will,
Which torture where they cannot kill;
And the inexorable Heaven,2

And the deaf tyranny of Fate,

The ruling principle of Hate,

20

vol. xxviii. p. 431), he writes (October 12, 1817, Letters, 1900, iv. 174): "The Prometheus, if not exactly in my plan, has always been so much in my head, that I can easily conceive its influence over all or any thing that I have written." The conception of an immortal sufferer at once beneficent and defiant, appealed alike to his passions and his convictions, and awoke a peculiar enthusiasm. His poems abound with allusions to the hero and the legend. Compare the first draft of stanza xvi. of the Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte (Poetical Works, 1900, iii. 312, var. ii.); The Prophecy of Dante, iv. 10, seq.; the Irish Avatar, stanza xii. line 2, etc.]