To fetters, and the damp vault's dayless gloom,
Their country conquers with their martyrdom,
And Freedom's fame finds wings on every wind.
Chillon thy prison is a holy place,

And thy sad floor an altar - for 't was trod,
Until his very steps have left a trace

Worn, as if thy cold pavement were a sod,
May none those marks efface!

By Bonnivard!

For they appeal from tyranny to God.

THE PRISONER OF CHILLON

Among the great lakes of the world, Geneva is famous for the beauty of its surroundings and the depth and purity of its waters. It was known to the Romans as Lacus Lemannus, whence Byron's favorite name for it, "Lake Leman."

At the eastern end of Lake Geneva, on an isolated rock at the edge of the water, rises the picturesque building known as the Castle of Chillon, its walls washed by the waters of the lake, which here attain a depth of nearly one thousand feet. The foundations of the castle date from a very early period; though as it stands, with its one central tower surrounded by towers either semicircular or square, it is essentially of the thirteenth century. In the eighteenth century it was used as a state prison, and afterwards as an arsenal. In this building, rendered famous by his genius, Byron lays the scene of his Prisoner of Chillon. The hero of the poem is an entirely fictitious personage, whose dreadful captivity bears little resemblance to that of Bonnivard, although the latter is often and wrongly supposed to be the hero. But Byron himself says in the "advertisement" prefixed to The Prisoner of Chillon: "When this poem was composed I was not sufficiently aware of the history of Bonnivard, or I should have endeavoured to dignify the subject by an attempt to celebrate his courage and his virtues."

But, although the whole story is purely imaginary, we must allow the poem in addition to its high poetic truth - a certain measure of historical probability, when we remember the deeds done in the days of religious intolerance and persecution, before men had learned to acknowledge the freedom of the individual conscience.

Byron wrote The Prisoner of Chillon in two days - June 26 and 27 1816, while detained by bad weather at the village of Ouchy, near

Lausanne. In dignity of theme and in descriptive power it far surpasses any of the narrative poems that preceded it. The hopeless captivity, the deaths of the two young brothers, the prisoner's grief, his unconsciousness of time and space in

A sea of stagnant idleness,

Blind, boundless, mute, and motionless;

the carol of the bird arousing him from his despair, his contentment with captivity, and at last — the crown of his desolation — his regaining his freedom with a sigh, all these are scenes that could be

adequately pictured only by the hand of a great master.

Μ

I

MY Nor grew it white

Y hair is grey, but not with years,

In a single night,

As men's have grown from sudden fears:
My limbs are bowed, though not with toil,
But rusted with a vile repose,

For they have been a dungeon's spoil,
And mine has been the fate of those

To whom the goodly earth and air
Are banned and barred — forbidden fare;

But this was for my father's faith

I suffered chains and courted death;
That father perished at the stake
For tenets he would not forsake;
And for the same his lineal race
In darkness found a dwelling-place;
We were seven who now are one,
Six in youth and one in age,
Finished as they had begun,
Proud of Persecution's rage;

One in fire, and two in field,

10

20

Their belief with blood have sealed,

Dying as their father died,

For the God their foes denied ;

Three were in a dungeon cast,

Of whom this wreck is left the last.

II

There are seven pillars of Gothic mould,
In Chillon's dungeons deep and old,
There are seven columns, massy and grey,
Dim with a dull imprisoned ray,

A sunbeam which hath lost its way,
And through the crevice and the cleft
Of the thick wall is fallen and left;
Creeping o'er the floor so damp,
Like a marsh's meteor lamp:
And in each pillar there is a ring,

And in each ring there is a chain;
That iron is a cankering thing,

1

For in these limbs its teeth remain,
With marks that will not wear away,
Till I have done with this new day,
Which now is painful to these eyes,
Which have not seen the sun so rise

For years I cannot count them o'er,
I lost their long and heavy score

When my last brother dropped and died,
And I lay living by his side.

III

They chained us each to a column stone,
And we were three - yet, each alone;
We could not move a single pace,

We could not see each other's face,

1 This is said to be an accurate description of the interior of the castle, except that the third column bears no trace of ever having had a ring. On the southern side of this third column is carved Byron's name.