Enjoyed the lonely, vigorous, harmless days
Of his old age in wilds of deepest maze.
LXII
Crime came not near him—she is not the child
Of solitude; Health shrank not from him—for
Her home is in the rarely trodden wild,
Where if men seek her not, and death be more
Their choice than life, forgive them, as beguiled
By habit to what their own hearts abhor—
In cities caged. The present case in point I
Cite is, that Boon lived hunting up to ninety;
LXIII
And, what’s still stranger, left behind a name
For which men vainly decimate the throng,
Not only famous, but of that good fame,
Without which Glory’s but a tavern song—
Simple, serene, the antipodes of Shame,
Which Hate nor Envy e’er could tinge with wrong;
An active hermit, even in age the child
Of Nature—or the Man of Ross684 run wild.
LXIV
’Tis true he shrank from men even of his nation,
When they built up unto his darling trees—
He moved some hundred miles off, for a station
Where there were fewer houses and more ease;
The inconvenience of civilisation
Is, that you neither can be pleased nor please;
But where he met the individual man,
He showed himself as kind as mortal can.
LXV
He was not all alone: around him grew
A sylvan tribe of children of the chase,
Whose young, unwakened world was ever new,
Nor sword nor sorrow yet had left a trace
On her unwrinkled brow, nor could you view
A frown on Nature’s or on human face;
The free-born forest found and kept them free,
And fresh as is a torrent or a tree.
LXVI
And tall, and strong, and swift of foot were they,
Beyond the dwarfing city’s pale abortions,
Because their thoughts had never been the prey
Of care or gain: the green woods were their portions;
No sinking spirits told them they grew grey,
No fashion made them apes of her distortions;
Simple they were, not savage—and their rifles,
Though very true, were not yet used for trifles.
LXVII
Motion was in their days, Rest in their slumbers,
And Cheerfulness the handmaid of their toil;
Nor yet too many nor too few their numbers;
Corruption could not make their hearts her soil;
The lust which stings, the splendour which encumbers,
With the free foresters divide no spoil;
Serene, not sullen, were the solitudes
Of this unsighing people of the woods.
LXVIII
So much for Nature:—by way of variety,
Now back to thy great joys, Civilisation!
And the sweet consequence of large society,
War—pestilence—the despot’s desolation,
The kingly scourge, the lust of notoriety,
The millions slain by soldiers for their ration,
The scenes like Catherine’s boudoir at threescore,685
With Ismail’s storm to soften it the more.
LXIX
The town was entered: first one column made
Its sanguinary way good—then another;
The reeking bayonet and the flashing blade
Clashed ’gainst the scimitar, and babe and mother
With distant shrieks were heard Heaven to upbraid:—
Still closer sulphury clouds began to smother
The breath of morn and man, where foot by foot
The maddened Turks their city still dispute.
LXX
Koutousow,686 he who afterwards beat back
(With some assistance from the frost and snow)
Napoleon on his bold and bloody track,
It happened was himself beat back just now:
He was a jolly fellow, and could crack
His jest alike in face of friend or foe,
Though Life, and Death, and Victory were at stake;687
But here it seemed his jokes had ceased to take:
LXXI
For having thrown himself into a ditch,
Followed in haste by various grenadiers,
Whose blood the puddle greatly did enrich,
He climbed to where the parapet appears;
But there his project reached its utmost pitch
(’Mongst other deaths the General Ribaupierre’s
Was much regretted), for the Muslim men
Threw them all down into the ditch again.688
LXXII
And had it not been for some stray troops landing
They knew not where, being carried by the stream
To some spot, where they lost their understanding,
And wandered up and down as in a dream,
Until they reached, as daybreak was expanding,
That which a portal to their eyes did seem—
The great and gay Koutousow might have lain
Where three parts of his column yet remain.689
LXXIII
And scrambling round the rampart, these same troops,
After the taking of the “Cavalier,”690
Just as Koutousow’s most “forlorn” of “hopes”
Took, like chameleons, some slight tinge of fear,
Opened the gate called “Kilia,” to the groups691
Of baffled heroes, who stood shyly near,
Sliding knee-deep in lately frozen mud,
Now thawed into a marsh of human blood.
LXXIV
The Kozacks, or, if so you please, Cossacques—
(I don’t much pique myself upon orthography,
So that I do not grossly err in facts,
Statistics, tactics, politics, and geography)—
Having been used to serve on horses’ backs,
And no great dilettanti in topography
Of fortresses, but fighting where it pleases
Their chiefs to order—were all cut to pieces.692
LXXV
Their column, though the Turkish batteries thundered
Upon them, ne’ertheless had reached the rampart,693
And naturally thought they could have plundered
The city, without being farther hampered;
But as it happens to brave men, they blundered—
The Turks at first pretended to have scampered,
Only to draw them ’twixt two bastion corners,694
From whence they sallied on those Christian scorners.
LXXVI
Then being taken by the tail—a taking
Fatal to bishops as to soldiers—these695
Cossacques were all cut off as day was breaking,
And found their lives were let at a short lease—
But perished without shivering or shaking,
Leaving as ladders their heaped carcasses,
O’er which Lieutenant-Colonel Yesouskoi
Marched with the brave battalion of Polouzki:—696
LXXVII
This valiant man killed all the Turks he met,
But could not eat them, being in his turn
Slain by some Mussulmans,697 who would not yet,
Without resistance, see their city burn.
The walls were won, but ’twas an even bet
Which of the armies would have cause to mourn:
’Twas blow for blow, disputing inch by
