Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. V. Browning to Rupert Brooke

E. Robert Bulwer, Lord Lytton (Owen Meredith) (1831–1891)

Athens (from After Paradise)

(1865)

THE BURNT-OUT heart of Hellas here behold!

Quench’d fire-pit of the quick explosive Past,

Thought’s highest crater—all its fervours cold,

Ashes and dust at last!

And what Hellenic light is living now

To gild, not Greece, but other lands, is given:

Not where the splendour sank, the after-glow

Of sunset stays in heaven.

But loud o’er Grecian ruins still the lark

Doth, as of old, Hyperion’s glory hail,

And from Hymettus, in the moonlight, hark

The exuberant nightingale!