O'er the Laocoon's all eternal throes, (1) And ever-dying Gladiator's air, (2) Their energy like life forms all their fame, Yet looks not life, for they are still the same.(*) Laocoönta petunt; et primum parva duorum "their destin'd way they take, And to Laocoon and his children make: And first around the tender boys they wind, Then with their sharpen'd fangs their limbs and bodies grind. With pious haste, but vain, they next invade : Twice round his waist their winding volumes roll'd, And twice about his gasping throat they fold. With both his hands he labours at the knots, His holy fillets the blue venom blots," &c. - DRYDEN. * (2) [See antè, Vol. VIII. p. 249.] (3) [MS.-"Distinct from life, as being still the same."] : ["The sublime mark of a great soul shines forth, in all its beauty, through those affecting expressions of pain and anguish that appear in the countenance of the famous Laocoon, and diffuse their horrors through his convulsed members. The bitterness of his torment seems to be imprinted on each muscle, and to swell every nerve; and it is expressed with peculiar energy, by the contraction of the abdomen and all the lower parts of his body this expression is so lively, that the attentive spectator partakes, in some measure, of the anguish it represents. The sufferings of the body and the elevation of the soul are expressed in every member with equal energy, and form the most sublime contrast imaginable. Laocoon suffers it, but he suffers like the Philoctetes of Sophocles; his lamentable situation pierces the heart, but fills us, at the same time, with an ambitious desire of being able to imitate his constancy and magnanimity in the pains and sufferings that may fall to our lot."- WINKELMANN. "In the group of the Laocoon, the frigid ecstasies of German criticism have discovered pity like a vapour swimming on the father's eyes; he is seen to suppress in the groan for his children the shriek for himself— his nostrils are drawn upward, to express indignation at unworthy sufferings, whilst he is said at the same time to implore celestial help. To these are added the winged effects of the serpent-poison, the writhings of the body, LXII. She woke at length, but not as sleepers wake, LXIII. She look'd on many a face with vacant eye, :. (1) [MS." She took their medicines without asking why."] the spasms of the extremities: to the miraculous organisation of such expression, Agesander, the sculptor of the Laocoon, was too wise to lay claim. His figure is a class: it characterises every beauty of virility verging on age; the prince, the priest, the father are visible, but, absorbed in the man, serve only to dignify the victim of one great expression; though poised by the artist for us, to apply the compass to the face of the Laocoon is to measure the wave fluctuating in the storm: this tempestuous front, this contracted nose, the immersion of these eyes, and, above all, that longdrawn mouth, are, separate and united, seats of convulsion, features of nature, struggling within the jaws of death."- FUSELL] LXIV. Her handmaids tended, but she heeded not; However dear or cherish'd in their day; LXV. And then a slave bethought her of a harp; (') On him her flashing eyes a moment bent, Then to the wall she turn'd as if to warp Her thoughts from sorrow through her heart re And he begun a long low island song Of ancient days, ere tyranny grew strong. LXVI. Anon her thin wan fingers beat the wall [sent; In time to his old tune; he changed the theme, And sung of love; the fierce name struck through all Her recollection; on her flash'd the dream Of what she was, and is, if ye could call To be so being; in a gushing stream The tears rush'd forth from her o'erclouded brain, Like mountain mists at length dissolved in rain. (1) [MS." At last some one bethought them of a harp."] LXVII. Short solace, vain relief!-thought came too quick, LXVIII. Yet she betray'd at times a gleam of sense; Nothing could make her meet her father's face, Though on all other things with looks intense She gazed, but none she ever could retrace; Food she refused, and raiment; no pretence Avail'd for either; neither change of place, Nor time, nor skill, nor remedy, could give her Senses to sleep-the power seem'd gone for ever. LXIX. Twelve days and nights she wither'd thus; at last, And they who watch'd her nearest could not know The very instant, till the change that cast Her sweet face into shadow, dull and slow, Glazed o'er her eyes — the beautiful, the black— Oh! to possess such lustre — and then lack !(1) (1) [" And then he drew a dial from his poke, And looking on it with lack-lustre eye."— As you Like It.] VOL. XVI. LXX. She died, but not alone; she held within LXXI. Thus lived-thus died she; never more on her (1) [MS. -"Have dawn'd a child of beauty, though of sin."] (2) ["Duncan is in his grave: After life's fitful fever he sleeps well."- Macbeth.] (3) [We think that few will withhold their sympathy from this affecting catastrophe, or refuse to drop a tear over the fate of the lovely and unfortunate Haidée, and to bid her 66 sleep well By the sea-shore, whereon she loved to dwell." Over this charming creature the poet has thrown a beauty and a fascination, which were never, we think, surpassed. In this, as in the former cantos, he pours out a singular mixture of pathos, doggrel, wit, and satire; taking a strange and almost malignant delight in dashing the laughter he has raised with tears, and crossing his finest and most affecting passages with burlesque ideas, against which no gravity is proof. CAMPBELL.] |