36. Our Adonais has drunk poison-oh!

What deaf and viperous murderer could crown
Life's early cup with such a draught of woe?

The nameless worm would now itself disown;
It felt, yet could escape, the magic tone
Whose prelude held all envy, hate, and wrong,
But what was howling in one breast alone,
Silent with expectation of the song

Whose master's hand is cold, whose silver lyre unstrung.

37. Live thou, whose infamy is not thy fame!

Live! fear no heavier chastisement from me,
Thou noteless blot on a remembered name!
But be thyself, and know thyself to be!
And ever at thy season be thou free
To spill the venom when thy fangs o'erflow:
Remorse and self-contempt shall cling to thee,
Hot shame shall burn upon thy secret brow,
And like a beaten hound tremble thou shalt-as now.

38. Nor let us weep that our delight is fled

Far from these carrion-kites that scream below.
He wakes or sleeps with the enduring dead;
Thou canst not soar where he is sitting now.
Dust to the dust: but the pure spirit shall flow
Back to the burning fountain whence it came,

A portion of the Eternal, which must glow

Through time and change, unquenchably the same, Whilst thy cold embers choke the sordid hearth of shame. 39. Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep!

He hath awakened from the dream of life.

'Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,

And in mad trance strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings. We decay

Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,

And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living ciay.
40. He has outsoared the shadow of our night.
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again.
From the contagion of the world's slow stain

He is secure; and now can never mourn

A heart grown cold, a head grown grey, in vain-
Nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn,
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.
41. He lives, he wakes-'tis Death is dead, not he;
Mourn not for Adonais.-Thou young Dawn,)
Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee
The spirit thou lamentest is not gone!

Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moan!
Cease, ye faint flowers and fountains! and, thou Air,
Which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown
O'er the abandoned Earth, now leave it bare
Even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair!
42. He is made one with Nature. There is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder to the song of night's sweet bird.
He is a presence to be felt and known

In darkness and in light, from herb and stone;
Spreading itself where'er that Power may move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own,
Which wields the world with never-wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.

43. He is a portion of the loveliness

Which once he made more lovely. He doth bear
His part, while the One Spirit's plastic stress

Sweeps through the dull dense world; compelling there
All new successions to the forms they wear;
Torturing the unwilling dross, that checks its flight,
To its own likeness, as each mass may bear;
And bursting in its beauty and its might

From trees and beasts and men into the heaven's light. 44. The splendours of the firmament of time

May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not;
Like stars to their appointed height they climb,
And death is a low mist which cannot blot
The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought
Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,

And love and life contend in it for what

Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there,

And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.

45. The inheritors of unfulfilled renown

Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought Far in the unapparent. Chatterton

Rose pale, his solemn agony had not

Yet faded from him; Sidney, as he fought,
And as he fell, and as he lived and loved,

Sublimely mild, a spirit without spot,

Arose; and Lucan, by his death approved ;-
Oblivion as they rose shrank like a thing reproved.
46. And many more, whose names on earth are dark,
But whose transmitted effluence cannot die

So long as fire outlives the parent spark,
Rose, robed in dazzling immortality.
"Thou art become as one of us," they cry;
"It was for thee yon kingless sphere has long
Swung blind in unascended majesty,

Silent alone amid an heaven of song.

Assume thy wingèd throne, thou Vesper of our throng!"

47. Who mourns for Adonais? Oh! come forth,

Fond wretch, and know thyself and him aright,
Clasp with thy panting soul the pendulous earth;
As from a centre, dart thy spirit's light
Beyond all worlds, until its spacious might
Satiate the void circumference: then shrink

Even to a point within our day and night;
And keep thy heart light, lest it make thee sink,
When hope has kindled hope, and lured thee to the brink.
48. Or go to Rome, which is the sepulchre,

Oh not of him, but of our joy. "Tis nought
That ages, empires, and religions, there

Lie buried in the ravage they have wrought;
For such as he can lend-they borrow not
Glory from those who made the world their prey;
And he is gathered to the kings of thought
Who waged contention with their time's decay,
And of the past are all that cannot pass away.
49. Go thou to Rome,-at once the paradise,
The grave, the city, and the wilderness;

And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise,
And flowering weeds and fragrant copses dress
The bones of Desolation's nakedness,

Pass, till the Spirit of the spot shall lead

Thy footsteps to a slope of green access,

Where, like an infant's smile, over the dead
A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread.
50. And grey walls moulder round, on which dull Time
Feeds, like slow fire upon a hoary brand;

And one keen pyramid with wedge sublime,
Pavilioning the dust of him who planned
This refuge for his memory, doth stand

Like flame transformed to marble; and beneath
A field is spread, on which a newer band

Have pitched in heaven's smile their camp of death, Welcoming him we lose with scarce extinguished breath. 51. Here pause. These graves are all too young as yet To have outgrown the sorrow which consigned

Its charge to each; and, if the seal is set

Here on one fountain of a mourning mind,
Break it not thou! too surely shalt thou find

Thine own well full, if thou returnest home,

Of tears and gall. From the world's bitter wind
Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb.

What Adonais is why fear we to become?

52. The One remains, the many change and pass;

Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity,

Until Death tramples it to fragments.- Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled !-Rome's azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music,-words are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.
53. Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my heart?
Thy hopes are gone before: from all things here
They have departed; thou shouldst now depart!
A light is past from the revolving year,

And man and woman; and what still is dear
Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither.

The soft sky smiles, the low wind whispers near : 'Tis Adonais calls! Oh! hasten thither!

No more let life divide what death can join together. 54. That light whose smile kindles the universe,

That beauty in which all things work and move,
That benediction which the eclipsing curse

Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which, through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,

Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.

55. The breath whose might I have invoked in song
Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given.
The massy earth and spherèd skies are riven!

I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar!

Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of heaven, The soul of Adonais, like a star,

Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

TO HIS EXCELLENCY

PRINCE ALEXANDER MAVROCORDATO,

LATE SECRETARY FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS TO THE HOSPODAR OF

WALLACHIA,

THE DRAMA OF HELLAS IS INSCRIBED,

AS AN IMPERFECT TOKEN OF THE ADMIRATION, SYMPATHY, AND FRIENDSHIP, OF THE AUTHOR.

PISA, November 1, 1821.

PREFACE.

THE poem of Hellas, written at the suggestion of the events of the moment, is a mere improvise, and derives its interest (should it be found to possess any) solely from the intense sympathy which the author feels with the cause he would celebrate.

The subject, in its present state, is insusceptible of being treated otherwise than lyrically; and, if I have called this poem a drama from the circumstance of its being composed in dialogue, the license is not greater than that which has been assumed by other poets who have called their productions epics only because they have been divided into twelve or twenty-four books.

The Perse of Eschylus afforded me the first model of my conception, although the decision of the glorious contest now waging in Greece being yet suspended forbids a catastrophe parallel to the return of Xerxes and the desolation of the Persians. I have therefore contented myself with exhibiting a series of lyric pictures. and with having wrought upon the curtain of futurity, which falls upon the unfinished scene, such figures of indistinct and visionary