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(From Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage)
FAIR Greece! sad relic of departed worth! | |
| Immortal, though no more; though fallen, great! | |
| Who now shall lead thy scattered children forth, | |
| And long-accustomed bondage uncreate? | |
| Not such thy sons who whilome did await, | 5 |
| The hopeless warriors of a willing doom, | |
| In bleak Thermopylæ’s sepulchral strait,— | |
| O, who that gallant spirit shall resume, | |
| Leap from Eurotas’ banks, and call thee from the tomb? | |
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| Spirit of Freedom! when on Phyle’s brow | 10 |
| Thou sat’st with Thrasybulus and his train, | |
| Couldst thou forebode the dismal hour which now | |
| Dims the green beauties of thine Attic plain? | |
| Not thirty tyrants now enforce the chain, | |
| But every carle can lord it o’er thy land; | 15 |
| Nor rise thy sons, but idly rail in vain, | |
| Trembling beneath the scourge of Turkish hand, | |
| From birth till death enslaved; in word, in deed, unmanned. | |
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| In all, save form alone, how changed! and who | |
| That marks the fire still sparkling in each eye, | 20 |
| Who but would deem their bosoms burned anew | |
| With thy unquenched beam, lost Liberty! | |
| And many dream withal the hour is nigh | |
| That gives them back their fathers’ heritage: | |
| For foreign arms and aid they fondly sigh, | 25 |
| Nor solely dare encounter hostile rage, | |
| Or tear their name defiled from Slavery’s mournful page. | |
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| Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not | |
| Who would be free themselves must strike the blow? | |
| By their right arms the conquest must be wrought? | 30 |
| Will Gaul or Muscovite redress ye? No! | |
| True, they may lay your proud despoilers low, | |
| But not for you will Freedom’s altars flame. | |
| Shades of the Helots! triumph o’er your foe! | |
| Greece! change thy lords, thy state is still the same; | 35 |
| Thy glorious day is o’er, but not thy years of shame. * * * * * | |
| And yet how lovely in thine age of woe, | |
| Land of lost gods and godlike men, art thou! | |
| Thy vales of evergreen, thy hills of snow | |
| Proclaim thee nature’s varied favorite now: | 40 |
| Thy fanes, thy temples to thy surface bow, | |
| Commingling slowly with heroic earth, | |
| Broke by the share of every rustic plough: | |
| So perish monuments of mortal birth, | |
| So perish all in turn, save well-recorded worth; | 45 |
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| Save where some solitary column mourns | |
| Above its prostrate brethren of the cave; | |
| Save where Tritonia’s airy shrine adorns | |
| Colonna’s cliff, and gleams along the wave; | |
| Save o’er some warrior’s half-forgotten grave, | 50 |
| Where the gray stones and unmolested grass | |
| Ages, but not oblivion, feebly brave, | |
| While strangers only not regardless pass, | |
| Lingering like me, perchance, to gaze, and sigh “Alas!” | |
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| Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild; | 55 |
| Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy fields, | |
| Thine olive ripe as when Minerva smiled, | |
| And still his honeyed wealth Hymettus yields; | |
| There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds, | |
| The freeborn wanderer of thy mountain air; | 60 |
| Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds, | |
| Still in his beam Mendeli’s marbles glare; | |
| Art, glory, freedom, fail, but nature still is fair. | |
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| Where’er we tread ’t is haunted, holy ground; | |
| No earth of thine is lost in vulgar mould, | 65 |
| But one vast realm of wonder spreads around, | |
| And all the muse’s tales seem truly told, | |
| Till the sense aches with gazing to behold | |
| The scenes our earliest dreams have dwelt upon: | |
| Each hill and dale, each deepening glen and wold | 70 |
| Defies the power which crushed thy temples gone: | |
| Age shakes Athena’s tower, but spares gray Marathon. | |
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| The sun, the soil, but not the slave, the same; | |
| Unchanged in all except its foreign lord— | |
| Preserves alike its bounds and boundless fame | 75 |
| The battle-field, where Persia’s victim horde | |
| First bowed beneath the brunt of Hellas’ sword, | |
| As on the morn to distant glory dear, | |
| When Marathon became a magic word; | |
| Which uttered, to the hearer’s eye appear | 80 |
| The camp, the host, the fight, the conqueror’s career. | |
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| The flying Mede, his shaftless broken bow; | |
| The fiery Greek, his red pursuing spear; | |
| Mountains above, earth’s, ocean’s plain below; | |
| Death in the front, destruction in the rear! | 85 |
| Such was the scene,—what now remaineth here? | |
| What sacred trophy marks the hallowed ground, | |
| Recording freedom’s smile and Asia’s tear? | |
| The rifled urn, the violated mound, | |
| The dust thy courser’s hoof, rude stranger! spurns around. | 90 |
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| Yet to the remnants of thy splendor past | |
| Shall pilgrims, pensive, but unwearied, throng; | |
| Long shall the voyager, with the Ionian blast, | |
| Hail the bright clime of battle and of song; | |
| Long shall thine annals and immortal tongue | 95 |
| Fill with thy fame the youth of many a shore; | |
| Boast of the aged! lesson of the young! | |
| Which sages venerate and bards adore, | |
| As Pallas and the muse unveil their awful lore. | |
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