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

1

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.

10

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 Gracia (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.

INTRODUCTION TO The blueS.

BYRON'S correspondence does not explain the mood in which he wrote The Blues, or afford the slightest hint or clue to its motif or occasion. In a letter to Murray, dated Ravenna, August 7, 1821, he writes, "I send you a thing which I scribbled off yesterday, a mere buffoonery, to quiz 'The Blues.' If published it must be anonymously. . . . You may send me a proof if you think it worth the trouble." Six weeks later, September 20, he had changed his mind. "You need not," he says, "send The Blues, which is a mere buffoonery not meant for publication." With these intimations our knowledge ends, and there is nothing to show why in August, 1821, he took it into his head "to quiz The Blues," or why, being so minded, he thought it worth while to quiz them in so pointless and belated a fashion. We can but guess that an allusion in a letter from England, an incident at a conversazione at Ravenna, or perhaps the dialogues in Peacock's novels, Melincourt and Nightmare Abbey, brought to his recollection the half-modish, halfliterary coteries of the earlier years of the Regency, and that he sketches the scenes and persons of his eclogue not from life, but from memory.

In the Diary of 1813, 1814, there is more than one mention of the "Blues." For instance, November 27, 1813, he writes, "Sotheby is a Littérateur, the oracle of the Coteries of the * 's, Lydia White (Sydney Smith's 'Tory Virgin'), Mrs. Wilmot (she, at least, is a swan, and might frequent a purer stream), Lady Beaumont and all the Blues, with Lady Charlemont at their head." Again on December 1, "Tomorrow there is a party of purple at the 'blue' Miss Berry's. Shall I go? um !-I don't much affect your blue-bottles ;but one ought to be civil.... Perhaps that blue-winged Kashmirian butterfly of book-learning Lady Charlemont will be there" (see Letters, 1898, ii. 333, 358, note 2).

Byron was, perhaps, a more willing guest at literary