XXI. The moon is up; by Heaven, a lovely eve! Or to some well-known measure featly move, Thoughtless, as if on shore they still were free to rove. XXII. Through Calpe's straits survey the steepy shore ; From mountain-cliff to coast descending sombre down. XXIII. 'Tis night, when Meditation bids us feel We once have loved, though love is at an end : The heart, lone mourner of its baffled zeal, Though friendless now, will dream it had a friend. 2 Who with the weight of years would wish to bend, When Youth itself survives young Love and Joy? Alas! when mingling souls forget to blend, Death hath but little left him to destroy ! Ah! happy years! once more who would not be a boy? ["Plies the brisk instrument that sailors love." - MS.] 2 ["Bleeds the lone heart, once boundless in its zeal, And friendless now, yet dreams it had a friend," - MS.] XXIV. Thus bending o'er the vessel's laving side, The soul forgets her schemes of Hope and Pride, A thought, and claims the homage of a tear; XXV. To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell, Converse with Nature's charms, and view her stores unroll'd. XXVI. But midst the crowd, the hum, the shock of men, To hear, to see, to feel, and to possess, And roam along, the world's tired denizen, With none who bless us, none whom we can bless; Minions of splendour shrinking from distress! None that, with kindred consciousness endued, If we were not, would seem to smile the less, Of all that flatter'd, follow'd, sought, and sued; This is to be alone; this, this is solitude! XXVII. More blest the life of godly eremite, Such as on lonely Athos may be seen, Watching at eve upon the giant height, 1 Which looks o'er waves so blue, skies so serene, XXVIII. Pass we the long, unvarying course, the track Oft trod, that never leaves a trace behind; Pass we the calm, the gale, the change, the tack, And each well known caprice of wave and wind; Pass we the joys and sorrows sailors find, Coop'd in their winged sea-girt citadel; The foul, the fair, the contrary, the kind, As breezes rise and fall and billows swell, Till on some jocund morn-lo, land! and all is well: XXIX. But not in silence pass Calypso's isles, 2 1 [One of Lord Byron's chief delights was, as he himself states in one of his journals, after bathing in some retired spot, to seat himself on a high rock above the sea, and there remain for hours, gazing upon the sky and the waters. "He led the life," says Sir Egerton Brydges, "as he wrote the strains, of a true poet. He could sleep, and very frequently did sleep, wrapped up in his rough great coat, on the hard boards of a deck, while the winds and the waves were roaring round him on every side, and could subsist on a crust and a glass of water. It would be difficult to persuade me, that he who is a coxcomb in his manners, and artificial in his habits of life, could write good poetry."] 2 Goza is said to have been the island of Calypso. -["The F There for the weary still a haven smiles, Though the fair goddess long hath ceased to weep, And o'er her cliffs a fruitless watch to keep For him who dared prefer a mortal bride: Here, too, his boy essay'd the dreadful leap Stern Mentor urged from high to yonder tide; While thus of both bereft, the nymph-queen doubly sighed. XXX. Her reign is past, her gentle glories gone: XXXI. Thus Harold deem'd, as on that lady's eye 1 Who knew his votary often lost and caught, identity of the habitation assigned by poets to the nymph Calypso, has occasioned much discussion and variety of opinion. Some place it at Malta, and some at Gozą." — Sir R. C. Hoare's Classical Tour.] ["Thus Harold spoke," &c. - MS.] XXXII. Fair Florence 1 found, in sooth with some amaze, One who, 't was said, still sigh'd to all he saw, Withstand, unmoved, the lustre of her gaze, Which others hail'd with real or mimic awe, Their hope, their doom, their punishment, their law; All that gay Beauty from her bondsmen claims: And much she marvell'd that a youth so raw Nor felt, nor feign'd at least, the oft-told flames, Which, though sometimes they frown, yet rarely anger dames. XXXIII. Little knew she that seeming marble heart, Yet never would he join the lover's whining crew. [For an account of this accomplished but eccentric lady, whose acquaintance the poet formed at Malta, see Miscellaneous Poems, September, 1809, "To Florence."-" In one so imaginative as Lord Byron, who, while he infused so much of his life into his poetry, mingled also not a little of poetry with his life, it is difficult," says Moore, "in unravelling the texture of his feelings, to distinguish at all times between the fanciful and the real. His description here, for instance, of the unmoved and loveless heart,' with which he contemplated even the charms of this attractive person, is wholly at variance with the statements in many of his letters; and, above all, with one of the most graceful of his lesser poems, addressed to this same lady, during a thunder-storm on his road to Zitza."] 2 [Against this line it is sufficient to set the poet's own declaration, in 1821" I am not a Joseph, nor a Scipio; but I can safely affirm, that I never in my life seduced any woman."] 3 ["We have here another instance of his propensity to selfmisrepresentation. However great might have been the irregu |