Of the three hundred grant but three,
To make a new Thermopylae!
VIII
What, silent still? and silent all?
Ah! no;—the voices of the dead
Sound like a distant torrent’s fall,
And answer, “Let one living head,
But one arise—we come, we come!”
’Tis but the living who are dumb.
IX
In vain—in vain: strike other chords;
Fill high the cup with Samian wine!
Leave battles to the Turkish hordes,
And shed the blood of Scio’s vine!
Hark! rising to the ignoble call—
How answers each bold Bacchanal!
X
You have the Pyrrhic dance as yet,312
Where is the Pyrrhic phalanx gone?
Of two such lessons, why forget
The nobler and the manlier one?
You have the letters Cadmus gave—
Think ye he meant them for a slave?
XI
Fill high the bowl with Samian wine!
We will not think of themes like these!
It made Anacreon’s song divine:
He served—but served Polycrates—313
A Tyrant; but our masters then
Were still, at least, our countrymen.
XII
The Tyrant of the Chersonese
Was Freedom’s best and bravest friend;
That tyrant was Miltiades!
Oh! that the present hour would lend
Another despot of the kind!
Such chains as his were sure to bind.
XIII
Fill high the bowl with Samian wine!
On Suli’s rock, and Parga’s shore,
Exists the remnant of a line
Such as the Doric mothers bore;
And there, perhaps, some seed is sown,
The Heracleidan blood might own.314
XIV
Trust not for freedom to the Franks—315
They have a king who buys and sells;
In native swords, and native ranks,
The only hope of courage dwells;
But Turkish force, and Latin fraud,
Would break your shield, however broad.
XV
Fill high the bowl with Samian wine!
Our virgins dance beneath the shade—
I see their glorious black eyes shine;
But gazing on each glowing maid,
My own the burning tear-drop laves,
To think such breasts must suckle slaves.
XVI
Place me on Sunium’s marbled steep,316
Where nothing, save the waves and I,
May hear our mutual murmurs sweep;
There, swan-like, let me sing and die:
A land of slaves shall ne’er be mine—
Dash down yon cup of Samian wine!
LXXXVII
Thus sung, or would, or could, or should have sung,
The modern Greek, in tolerable verse;
If not like Orpheus quite, when Greece was young,
Yet in these times he might have done much worse:
His strain displayed some feeling—right or wrong;
And feeling,317 in a poet, is the source
Of others’ feeling; but they are such liars,
And take all colours—like the hands of dyers.
LXXXVIII
But words are things,318 and a small drop of ink,
Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think;
’Tis strange, the shortest letter which man uses
Instead of speech, may form a lasting link
Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces
Frail man, when paper—even a rag like this,
Survives himself, his tomb, and all that’s his!
LXXXIX
And when his bones are dust, his grave a blank,
His station, generation, even his nation,
Become a thing, or nothing, save to rank
In chronological commemoration,
Some dull MS. Oblivion long has sank,
Or graven stone found in a barrack’s station
In digging the foundation of a closet,319
May turn his name up, as a rare deposit.
XC
And Glory long has made the sages smile;
’Tis something, nothing, words, illusion, wind—
Depending more upon the historian’s style
Than on the name a person leaves behind:
Troy owes to Homer what whist owes to Hoyle:320
The present century was growing blind
To the great Marlborough’s skill in giving knocks,
Until his late Life by Archdeacon Coxe.321
XCI
Milton’s the Prince of poets—so we say;
A little heavy, but no less divine:
An independent being in his day—
Learned, pious, temperate in love and wine;
But, his life falling into Johnson’s way,
We’re told this great High Priest of all the Nine
Was whipped at college—a harsh sire—odd spouse,
For the first Mrs. Milton left his house.322
XCII
All these are, certes, entertaining facts,
Like Shakespeare’s stealing deer, Lord Bacon’s bribes;
Like Titus’ youth, and Caesar’s earliest acts;323
Like Burns (whom Doctor Currie well describes);324
Like Cromwell’s pranks;325—but although Truth exacts
These amiable descriptions from the scribes,
As most essential to their Hero’s story,
They do not much contribute to his glory.
XCIII
All are not moralists, like Southey, when
He prated to the world of “Pantisocracy;”326
Or Wordsworth unexcised,327 unhired, who then
Seasoned his pedlar poems with Democracy;328
Or Coleridge329 long before his flighty pen
Let to the Morning Post its aristocracy;330
When he and Southey, following the same path,
Espoused two partners (milliners of Bath).331
XCIV
Such names at present cut a convict figure,
The very Botany Bay in moral geography;
Their loyal treason, renegado rigour,
Are good manure for their more bare biography;
Wordsworth’s last quarto, by the way, is bigger
Than any since the birthday of typography;
A drowsy, frowzy poem, called the “Excursion,”
Writ in a manner which is my aversion.
XCV
He there builds up a formidable dyke
Between his own and others’ intellect;
But Wordsworth’s poem, and his followers, like
Joanna Southcote’s Shiloh332 and her sect,
Are things which in this century don’t strike
The public mind—so few are the elect;
And the new births of both their stale Virginities
Have proved but Dropsies, taken for Divinities.
XCVI
But let me to my story: I must own,
If I have any fault, it is digression,
Leaving my people to proceed alone,
While I soliloquize beyond expression:
But these are my addresses from the throne,
Which put off business to the ensuing session:
Forgetting each omission is a loss to
The world, not quite so great as Ariosto.
XCVII
I know that what our neighbours call “longueurs,”
(We’ve not so good a word, but have the thing,
In that complete perfection which insures
An epic from Bob Southey every spring—)
Form not the
