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What of them is left, to tell

Where they lie, and how they fell?

Not a stone on their turf, nor a bone in their graves; But they live in the verse that immortally saves.

THE MAGAZINE

Darkly, sternly, and all alone,
Minotti stood o'er the altar-stone:
Madonna's face upon him shone,
Painted in heavenly hues above,
With eyes of light and looks of love;
And placed upon that holy shrine
To fix our thoughts on things divine,
When pictured there, we kneeling see
Her, and the boy-God on her knee,
Smiling sweetly on each prayer
To heaven, as if to waft it there.
Still she smiled; even now she smiles,
Though slaughter streams along her aisles:
Minotti lifted his aged eye,

And made the sign of a cross with a sigh,
Then seized a torch which blazed thereby;
And still he stood, while with steel and flame
Inward and onward the Mussulman came.

The vaults beneath the mosaic stone
Contained the dead of ages gone;
Their names were on the graven floor,
But now illegible with gore;
The carvèd crests, and curious hues
The varied marble's veins diffuse,

Were smeared, and slippery, stained, and strown
With broken swords and helms o'erthrown:

There were dead above, and the dead below
Lay cold in many a coffined row;

You might see them piled in sable state,
By a pale light through a gloomy grate;
But War had entered their dark caves,
And stored along the vaulted graves
Her sulphurous treasures, thickly spread
In masses by the fleshless dead:

Here, throughout the siege, had been
The Christians' chiefest magazine;
To these a late formed train now led,
Minotti's last and stern resource
Against the foe's o'erwhelming force.

The foe came on, and few remain
To strive, and those must strive in vain:
For lack of further lives, to slake
The thirst of vengeance now awake,
With barbarous blows they gash the dead,
And lop the already lifeless head,
And fell the statues from their niche,
And spoil the shrines of offerings rich,
And from each other's rude hands wrest
The silver vessels saints had blessed.
To the high altar on they go;
O, but it made a glorious show!
On its table still behold

The cup of consecrated gold;

Massy and deep, a glittering prize,

Brightly it sparkles to plunderers' eyes:

That morn it held the holy wine,

Converted by Christ to his blood so divine,

Which his worshippers drank at the break of day,
To shrive their souls ere they joined in the fray.
Still a few drops within it lay;

And round the sacred table glow
Twelve lofty lamps, in splendid row,

From the purest metal cast;

A spoil-the richest, and the last.

So near they came, the nearest stretched
To grasp the spoil he almost reached,
When old Minotti's hand

Touched with the torch the train

'Tis fired!

Spire, vaults, the shrine, the spoil, the slain,

The turbaned victors, the Christian band, All that of living or dead remain,

Hurl'd on high with the shivered fane,

In one wild roar expired!

The shattered town-the walls thrown down

The waves a moment backward bent

The hills that shake, although unrent,
As if an earthquake passed—

The thousand shapeless things all driven
In cloud and flame athwart the heaven
By that tremendous blast-
Proclaimed the desperate conflict o'er
On that too long afflicted shore:
Up to the sky like rockets go

All that mingled there below:

Many a tall and goodly man,
Scorched and shrivelled to a span,
When he fell to earth again
Like a cinder strewed the plain:

Down the ashes shower like rain;

Some fell in the gulf, which received the sprinkles
With a thousand circling wrinkles;

Some fell on the shore, but far away
Scattered o'er the isthmus lay;
Christian or Moslem, which be they?
Let their mother say and say!
When in cradled rest they lay,
And each nursing mother smiled
On the sweet sleep of her child,
Little deemed she such a day
Would rend those tender limbs away.
Not the matrons that them bore
Could discern their offspring more;
That one moment left no trace
More of human form or face
Save a scattered scalp or bone:
And down came blazing rafters, strown
Around, and many a falling stone,
Deeply dinted in the clay,

All blackened there and reeking lay.
All the living things that heard
That deadly earth-shock disappeared:
The wild birds flew; the wild dogs fled,
And howling left the unburied dead;
The camels from their keepers broke;
The distant steer forsook the yoke—

The nearer steed plunged o'er the plain,
And burst his girth, and tore his rein;
The bull-frog's note from out the marsh
Deep-mouthed arose, and doubly harsh;
The wolves yelled on the caverned hill
Where echo rolled in thunder still;
The jackals' troop in gathered cry
Bayed from afar complainingly,
With a mixed and mournful sound,
Like crying babe, and beaten hound:
With sudden wing and ruffled breast
The eagle left his rocky nest,
And mounted nearer to the sun,

The clouds beneath him seemed so dun;
Their smoke assailed his startled beak,
And made him higher soar and shriek—
Thus was Corinth lost and won!

LXXIV

ALHAMA

THE Moorish King rides up and down,
Through Granada's royal town;

From Elvira's gates to those
Of Bivarambla on he goes.

Woe is me, Alhama!

Letters to the monarch tell
How Alhama's city fell:
In the fire the scroll he threw,

And the messenger he slew.

Woe is me, Alhama!

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