| |
| JUST at the point | |
| Of facing death in fronting Moslem steel, | |
| Lo! in the fever’s silent strife he sank! | |
| Out of the valorous yet chaotic Greeks | |
| His skill and nerve had gathered ordered ranks. | 5 |
| May not the chaos of his passions first | |
| Have heard “light” summoned, and have felt its dawn? | |
| May not the liberty of God’s own truth | |
| Have struck some shackles of his bondage off | |
| While he was seeking to make others free? | 10 |
| Amid the blackness we must see and shun | |
| Gleams out a light wherein is read the hint | |
| Of the surpassing glory sin eclipsed. | |
| Who knows what age or illness might have wrought; | |
| Those two reformers of an evil life, | 15 |
| That have of vilest sinners moulded saints? | |
| Be it not ours to cover vice of his, | |
| But to remember we have seen his worst, | |
| Which most men hide as niggards do their hoard. | |
| |
| While thought drinks in the purest tones he struck, | 20 |
| All her nerves tremble with bewildered joy: | |
| Round some creations such a splendor burns, | |
| He seems himself the very lyric god, | |
| Encircling whom great passions of the soul | |
| With linkéd hands, like maids of Helicon, | 25 |
| Accord his power in faultless harmonies. | |
| Greece lives forever in his splendid verse, | |
| Which, should her relics utter ruins lie, | |
| Could bound her glory with immortal lines. | |
| Fitting that he who loved and sang of her | 30 |
| Should breathe his life out on her lovely shore! | |
| Wave-beaten Missolonghi, it is thou | |
| That hold’st the parting secrets of that soul | |
| Not walled, like thee, with strength, but like thyself | |
| Beaten forever by the mighty sea! | 35 |
| |
