Islam must fall, but we will reign together
Over its ruins in the world of death :-
And if the trunk be dry, yet shall the seed
Unfold itself even in the shape of that
Which gathers birth in its decay. Woe! woe!
To the weak people tangled in the grasp
Of its last spasms.

Mahmud. Spirit, woe to all !
Woe to the wronged and the avenger! Woe
To the destroyer, woe to the destroyed !
Woe to the dupe, and woe to the deceiver !
Woe to the oppressed and woe to the oppressor!
Woe both to those that suffer and inflict;
Those who are born, and those who die! But say,
Imperial shadow of the thing I am,
When, how, by whom, Destruction must accomplish
Her consummation?
Phantom.

Ask the cold pale Hour,
Rich in reversion of impending death,
When he shall fall upon whose ripe grey hairs
Sit care, and sorrow, and infirmity-
The weight which Crime, whose wings are plumed with years,
Leaves in his flight from ravaged heart to heart
Over the heads of men, under which burthen
They bow themselves unto the grave : fond wretch !
He leans upon his crutch, and talks of years
To come, and how in hours of youth renewed
He will renew lost joys, and-
Voice without.

Victory! victory!

[The Phantom vanishes. Mahmud. What sound of the importunate earth has broken My mighty trance ? Voice without.

Victory! victory ! Mahmud. Weak lightning before darkness ! poor faint smile Of dying Islam ! Voice which art the response Of hollow weakness! Do I wake and live ? Were there such things ? or may the unquiet brain, Vexed by the wise mad talk of the old Jew, Have shaped itself these shadows of its fear ? It matters not !—for nought we see or dream, Possess, or lose, or grasp at, can be worth More than it gives or teaches. Come what may, The future must become the past, and I As they were, to whom once this present hour, This gloomy crag of time to which I cling, Seerned an Elysian isle of peace and joy Never to be attained.--I must rebuke This drunkenness of triumph ere it die, And dying, bring despair.- Victory !- poor slaves !

Exit MAHMUD. Voice without. Shout in the jubilee of death! The Greeks Are as a brood of lions in the net, Round which the kingly hunters of the earth Staud smiling. Anarchs, ye whose daily food Are curses, groans, and gold, the fruit of death, From Thule to the girdle of the world, Come, feast ! the board groans with the flesh of menThe cup is foaming with a nation's blood, Famine and thirst await: eat, drink, and die !

SEMICHORUS I.
Victorious Wrong, with vulture scream,
Salutes the risen sun, pursues the flying day!

I saw her ghastly as a tyrant's dream,
Perch on the trembling pyramid of night,
Beneath which earth and all her realus pavilioned lay
In visions of the dawning undelight.

Who shall impede her flight?

Who rob her of her prey ?
Voice without. Victory! victory ! Russia's famished eagles
Dare not to prey beneath the crescent's light.
Impale the remnant of the Greeks ! despoil !
Violate! make their flesh cheaper than dust!

SEMICHORUS II.
Thou voice which art
The herald of the ill in splendour hid !

Thou echo of the hollow heart
Of monarchy, bear me to thine abode

When desolation flashes o'er a world destroyed.
Oh bear me to those isles of jagged cloud

Which float like mountains on the earthquakes, 'mid The momentary oceans of the lightning;

Or to some toppling promontory proud

Of solid tempest, whose black pyramid, Riven, overhangs the founts intensely brightening

Of those dawn-tinted deluges of fire

Before their waves expire,
When heaven and earth are light, and only light

In the thunder-night!
Voice without. Victory! victory! Austria, Russia, England,
And that tame serpent, that poor shadow, France,
Cry peace, and that means death when monarchs speak.
Ho, there ! bring torches, sharpen those red stakes!
These chains are light, fitter for slaves and poisoners
Tban Greeks. Kill! plunder! burn ! let none remain.

SEMICHORUS I.
Alas for Liberty !
If numbers, wealth, or unfulfilling years,
Or fate, can quell the free;

Alas for Virtue! when

Torments, or contamely, or the sneers

Of erring judging men

Can break the heart where it abides. Alas ! if Love, whose smile makes this obscure world splendid

Can change, with its false times and tides,

Like hope and terror

Alas for Love !
And Truth, who wanderest lone and unbefriended,
If thou canst veil thy lie-consuming mirror

Before the dazzled eyes of Error.
Alas for thee! Image of the Above.

SEMICHORUS II.
Repulse, with plumes from conquest torn,
Led the ten thousand from the limits of the morn

Through many an hostile Anarchy!
At length they wept aloud and cried, “ The sea! the sea ! "
Through exile, persecution, and despair,

Rome was, and young Atlantis shall become

The wonder, or the terror, or the tomb
Of all whose step wakes power lulled in her savage lair
But Greece was as a hermit child,

Whose fairest thoughts and limbs were built
To woman's growth, by dreams so mild

She knew not pain or guilt ;
And now, O Victory, blush! and Empire, tremble,

When ye desert the free!

If Greece must be
A wreck, yet shall its fragments reassemble,
And build themselves again impregnably

In a diviner clime,
To Amphionic music, on some Cape sublime,
Which frowns above the idle foam of Time.

SEMICHORUS I.

Let the tyrants rule the desert they have made;

Let the free possess the paradise they claim;
Be the fortune of our fierce oppressors weighed
With our ruin, our resistance, and our name !

SEMICHORUS II.
Our dead shall be the seed of their decay,

Our survivors be the shadows of their pride,
Our adversity a dream to pass away-

Their dishonour a remembrance to abide !

Voice without. Victory ! Victory! The bought Briton sends The keys of ocean to the Islamite. Now shall the blazon of the cross be veiled, And British skill directing Othman might, Thunder-strike rebel victory. O keep holy This jubilee of unrevenged blood ! Kill | crush! despoil! Let not a Greek escape !

SEMICHORUS I.
Darkness has dawned in the East

On the noon of time :
The death-birds descend to their feast,

From the hungry clime.
Let Freedom and Peace flee far

To a sunnier strand,
And follow Love's folding star !
To the Evening land !

SEMICHORUS II.
The young moon has fed

Her exhausted horn
With the sunset's fire :
The weak day is dead,

But the night is not born ;
And, like loveliness panting with wild desire,
While it trembles with fear and delight,
Hesperus flies from awakening night,
And pants in its beauty and speed with light

Fast-flashing, soft and bright.
Thou beacon of love ! thou lamp of the free !

Guide us far, far away,
To climes where now, veiled by the ardour of day,

Thou art hidden
From waves on which weary noon
Faints in her summer swoon,
Between kingless continents, sinless as Eden,
Around mountains and islands in violably
Puankt on the sapphire sea.

SEMICHORUS I.
Through the sunset of hope,
Like the shapes of a dream,
What Paradise islands of glory gleam

Beneath Heaven's cope.

Their shadows more clear float by-
The sound of their oceans, the light of their sky,
The music and fragrance their solitudes breathe,
Burst like morning on dreams, or like Heaven on death,

Through the walls of our prison ;
And Greece, which was dead, is arisen !

CHORUS.

a

The world's great age begins anew,

The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew

Hier winter weeds outworn :
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

A brighter Hellas rears its mountains

From waves serener far;

A new Peneus rolls its fountains

Against the morning-star.
Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.

A loftier Argo cleaves the main,

Fraught with a later prize;
Another Orpheus sings again,

And loves, and weeps, and dies.
A new Ulysses leaves once more
Calypso for his native shore.
O write no more the tale of Troy,

If earth Death's scroll must be !
Nor mix with Laian rage the joy

Which dawns upon the free: Although a subtler sphinx renew Riddles of death Thebes never knew.

Another Athens shall arise,

And to remoter time
Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,

The splendour of its prime;
And leave, if nought so bright may live,
All earth can take or heaven can give.

Saturn and Love their long repose

Shall burst, more bright and good
Than all who fell, than One who rose,

Than many unsubdued :
Not gold, not blood, their altar dowers,
But votive tears, and symbol flowers.

O cease! must hate and death return?

Cease ! must men kill and die ?
Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn

Of bitter prophecy.
The world is weary of the past,
O might it die or rest at last !

• See Notes at the end of the volume.

Z