Sal.

Sar.

Indeed!

[hair,

You see, this night
Made warriors of more than me. I paused
To look upon her, and her kindled cheek;
Her large black eyes, that flash'd through her long
As it stream'd o'er her; her blue veins, that rose
Along her most transparent brow; her nostril
Dilated from its symmetry; her lips

Apart; her voice that clove through all the din,
As a lute's pierceth through the cymbal's clash,
Jarr'd but not drown'd by the loud brattling; her
Waved arms, more dazzling with their own born
whiteness

Than the steel her hand held, which she caught up
From a dead soldier's grasp;-all these things made
Her seem unto the troops a prophetess

Of victory, or Victory herself,

Come down to hail us hers.

I love

Myr. Sardanapalus. Sal. But wouldst have him king still? Myr. I would not have him less than what he should be.

Sal. Well then, to have him king, and yours, and all He should or should not be; to have him live, Let him not sink back into luxury. You have more power upon his spirit than Wisdom within these walls, or fierce rebellion Raging without: look well that he relapse not. Myr. There needed not the voice of Salemenes To urge me on to this: I will not fail. All that a woman's weakness canSal. Omnipotent o'er such a heart as his: Exert it wisely.

Is power [Exit SALEMENES. Myrrha! what, at whispers

Sar, With my stern brother? I shall soon be jealous. (1) Myr. (smiling.) You have cause, sire; for on the

earth there breathes not

A man more worthy of a woman's love-
A soldier's trust-a subject's reverence-
A king's esteein-the whole world's admiration! (2)

(1) "The rebels are at length repulsed. The king reenters wounded, and retires to rest, after a short and very characteristic conversation between Salemenes and Myrrha, in which the two kindred spirits show their mutual understanding of each other; and the loyal warrior, postponing all the selfish domestic feelings which led him to dislike the fair Ionian, exhorts her to use her utmost power to keep her lover from relaxing into luxury. The transient effect which their whispers produce on Sardanapalus is well imagined." Heber.-L. E.

Sar. Praise him, but not so warmly. I must not
Hear those sweet lips grow eloquent in aught
That throws me into shade; yet you speak truth.
Myr. And now retire, to have your wound look'd to.
Pray lean on me.
Sar.

Yes, love! but not from pain.
[Exeunt omnes.

ACT IV.

SCENE I.

SARDANAPALUS discovered sleeping upon a Couch, and occasionally disturbed in his Slumbers, with MYRRHA watching.

Myr. (sola, gazing.) I have stolen upon his rest, il
rest it be,

Which thus convulses slumber: shall I wake him?
No, he seems calmer. Oh, thou God of Quiet!
Whose reign is o'er seal'd eyelids and soft dreams,
Or deep, deep sleep, so as to be unfathom'd,
Look like thy brother, Death,-so still-so stirless-
For then we are happiest, as it may be, we
Are happiest of all within the realm
Of thy stern, silent, and unwakening twin.
Again he moves-again the play of pain
Shoots o'er his features, as the sudden gust
Crisps the reluctant lake that lay so calm (3)
Beneath the mountain shadow; or the blast
Ruffles the autumn leaves, that drooping cling
Faintly and motionless to their loved boughs.
I must awake him—yet not yet: who knows
From what I rouse him? It seems pain; but if
I quicken him to heavier pain? The fever
Of this tumultuous night, the grief too of
His wound, though slight, may cause all this, and shak
Me more to see than him to suffer. No:
Let Nature use her own maternal means,—
And I await to second, not disturb her. (4)

Sar. (awakening.) Not so-although ye multiplie
the stars,

And gave them to me as a realm to share
From you and with you! I would not so purchase
The empire of eternity. Hence—hence-
Old hunter of the earliest brutes! and ye,
Who hunted fellow-creatures as if brutes!
Once bloody mortals-and now bloodier idols,
If your priests lie not! And thou, ghastly beldame
Dripping with dusky gore, and trampling ou
The carcasses of Inde-away! away!
Where am I? Where the spectres? Where-
No-that

Is no false phantom: I should know it 'midst
All that the dead dare gloomily raise up
From their black gulf to daunt the living. Myrrha!

Myr. Alas! thou art pale, and on thy brow the drops
Gather like night-dew. My beloved, hush—
Calm thee. Thy speech seems of another world,

Sleep shows such things, what may not death disclose?
Mgr. I know no evil death can show, which life
Has not already shown to those who live
Embodied longest. If there be indeed

Ashore where mind survives, 't will be as mind,
All unincorporate: or if there flits

A shadow of this cumbrous clog of clay,
With stalks, methinks, between our souls and heaven,
And fetters us to earth-at least the phantom,
Whateer it have to fear, will not fear death.

Ser. I fear it not; but I have felt-have seen-
Alein of the dead.

Mar.

And so have I.

The dust we tread upon was once alive,

And wretched. But proceed: what hast thou seen? Speak it, 'twill lighten thy dimm'd mind.

Sar.

MethoughtMr. Yet pause, thou art tired-in pain-exhausted; all

hich can impair both strength and spirit: seek lather to sleep again.

Sar.

Not now-I would not

eam; though I know it now to be a dream What I have dreamt:-and canst thou bear to hear it? Myr. I can bear all things, dreams of life or death, Which I participate with you in semblance

Ir full reality.

bar.

tell

And this look'd real,

you: after that these eyes were open,

Semiramis, with whom, and the rest of his regal preessors, he had fancied himself at a ghostly banquet." leber -L. E.

The general tone of Myrrha's character (in perfect istency with the manners of her age and nation, and her own elevated but pure and feminine spirit.) is that fa devout worshipper of her country's gods. She re es, with dignity, the impious flattery of the Assyrian artiers and the libertine scoffs of the king. She does not , while preparing for death, that libation which was latest and most solemn act of Grecian piety; and she, ere particularly, expresses her belief in a future state of istence. Yet this very Myrrha, when Sardanapalus is tated by his evil dream, and by the natural doubt as to that worse visions death may bring, is made to console im, in the strain of his own Epicurean philosophy, with be doctrine that death is really nothing, except

'Cato the timid, who anticipate

That which may never be,'

I saw them in their flight-for then they fled. Myr. Say on.

Sar. I saw, that is, I dream'd myself Here-here-even where we are, guests as we were, Myself a host that deem'd himself but guest, Willing to equal all in social freedom; But, on my right hand and my left, instead Of thee and Zames, and our custom'd meeting, Was ranged on my left hand a haughty, dark, And deadly face-I could not recognise it, Yet I had seen it, though I knew not where: The features were a giant's, and the eye Was still, yet lighted; his long locks curl'd down On his vast bust, whence a huge quiver rose With shaft-heads feather'd from the eagle's wing, (2) That peep'd up bristling through his serpent hair. I invited him to fill the cup which stood Between us, but he answer'd not-I fill'd it— He took it not, but stared upon me, till I trembled at the fix'd glare of his eye:

nd with the insinuation that all which remains of the lead is the dust we tread upon. We do not wish to ask, e do not like to conjecture, whose sentiments these are, at they are certainly not the sentiments of an ancient eriau heroine. They are not the sentiments which Myrrha haght have learned from the heroes of her native land, or

from the poems whence those heroes derived their heroism, their contempt of death, and their love of virtue.' Myrrha would rather have told her lover of those happy islands where the benevolent and the brave reposed after the toils of their mortal existence; of that venerable society of departed warriors and sages, to which, if he renounced his sloth and lived for his people and for glory, he might yet expect admission. She would have told him of that joy with which his warlike ancestors would move along their meads of asphodel, when the news reached them of their descendant's prowess; she would have anticipated those songs which denied that 'Harmodius was dead,' however he might be removed from the sphere of mortality; which told her countrymen of the roses and the golden-fruited bowers, where, beneath the light of a lower sun, departed warriors reined their shadowy cars, or struck their harps amid altars steaming with frankincense.' Such were the doctrines which naturally led men to a contempt for life and a thirst for glory: but the opposite opinions were the doubts of a later day; and of those sophists under whose influence Greece soon ceased to be free, or valiant or virtuous." Heber.-L. E. (2) In the MS.

"With arrows peeping through his falling hair."-L. E.

Hom. Odyss. 2. 539. Callistratus ap. Athenæum, 1. xv. Pindar Fragm. Heyne, vol. iii. p. 31.

It was so palpable, I could have touch'd them.
I turn'd from one face to another, in
The hope to find at last one which I knew
Ere I saw theirs: but no-all turn'd upon me,
And stared, but neither ate nor drank, but stared,
Till I grew stone, as they seem'd half to be,
Yet breathing stone, for I felt life in them,
And life in me: there was a horrid kind

Of sympathy between us, as if they
Had lost a part of death to come to me,
And I the half of life to sit by them.
We were in an existence all apart

From heaven or earth-And rather let me see
Death all than such a being!

Sar. At last I sate, marble as they, when rose The hunter and the crone; and smiling on meYes, the enlarged but noble aspect of The hunter smiled upon me-I should say, His lips, for his eyes moved not-and the woman's Thin lips relax'd to something like a smile. Both rose, and the crown'd figures on each hand Rose also, as if aping their chief shadesMere mimics even in death-but I sate still: A desperate courage crept through every limb, And at the last I fear'd them not, but laugh'd Full in their phantom faces. But then-then The hunter laid his hand on mine: I took it, And grasp'd it but it melted from my own; While he too vanish'd, and left nothing but The memory of a hero, for he look'd so.

Myr. And was: the ancestor of heroes, too,
And thine no less.

Sar.
Ay, Myrrha, but the woman,
The female who remain'd, she flew upon me,
And burnt my lips up with her noisome kisses;
And, flinging down the goblets on each hand,
Methought their poisons flow'd around us, till
Each form'd a hideous river. Still she clung;
The other phantoms, like a row of statues,
Stood dull as in our temples, but she still
Embraced me, while I shrunk from her, as if,
In lieu of her remote descendant, I

Had been the son who slew her for her incest.
Then-then-a chaos of all loathsome things
Throng'd thick and shapeless: I was dead, yet feeling-
Buried, and raised again-consumed by worms,
Purged by the flames, and wither'd in the air!
I can fix nothing further of my thoughts,
Save that I long'd for thee, and sought for thee,
In all these agonies,-and woke and found thee.
Myr. So shalt thou find me ever at thy side,
Here and hereafter, if the last may be.
But think not of these things-the mere creations
Of late events, acting upon a frame
Unused to toil, yet over-wrought by toil
Such as might try the sternest.

For all the predecessors of our line
Rose up, methought, to drag me down to them.
My father was amongst them, too; but he,
I know not why, kept from me, leaving me
Between the hunter-founder of our race,
And her, the homicide and husband-killer,
Whom you call glorious.
So I term you also,

Sal.
Now you have shown a spirit like to hers.
By day-break I propose that we set forth,
And charge once more the rebel crew, who still
Keep gathering head, repulsed, but not quite quell'd
Sar. How wears the night?
Sal.

There yet remain some hour Of darkness: use them for your further rest. Sar. No, not to-night, if 'tis not gone: methough I pass'd hours in that vision.

At least, I trust so: in a word, the queen
Requests to see you ere you part-for ever.

Sar. Unto what end? what purpose? I will gra Aught-all that she can ask-but such a meeting Sal. You know, or ought to know, enough

women,

Since you have studied them so steadily,
That what they ask in aught that touches on
The heart, is dearer to their feelings or

Tigris, in opposition not only to the uniform tradition eft
East, but to the express assertions of Herodotus, Pliny,
Ptolemy." Heber.-L. E.

Sal.

Re-enter SALEMENES and ZARINA.

My sister! Courage: Shame not our blood with trembling, but remember From whence we sprung. The queen is present, sire. Zar. I pray thee, brother, leave me. Sal.

Since you ask it. [Exit SALEMENES. Zar. Alone with him! How many a year has pass'd, Though we are still so young, since we have met, Which I have worn in widowhood of heart. (1) He loved me not: yet he seems little changedChanged to me only-would the change were mutual! He speaks not-scarce regards me-not a wordNor look-yet he was soft of voice and aspect! Indifferent, not austere. My lord!

Sar.

Zarina!

I had half forgotten,

Zar. And could have welcomed any grief save yours, Which gave me to behold your face again.

Sar. The throne-I say it not in fear-but 'tis In peril; they perhaps may never mount it: But let them not for this lose sight of it. I will dare all things to bequeath it them; But if I fail, then they must win it back Bravely-and, won, wear it wisely, not as I Have wasted down my royalty.

Zar.

They ne'er
Shall know from me of aught but what may honour
Their father's memory. (3)

Sar.
Rather let them hear
The truth from you than from a trampling world.
If they be in adversity, they'll learn

Too soon the scorn of crowds for crownless princes,
And find that all their father's sins are theirs.
My boys!-I could have borne it were I childless.
Zar. Oh! do not say so-do not poison all
My peace left, by unwishing that thou wert
A father. If thou conquerest, they shall reign,
And honour him who saved the realm for them,
So little cared for as his own; and if――

Sar. 'Tis lost, all earth will cry out, thank your
And they will swell the echo with a curse. [father!
Zar. That they shall never do; but rather honour
The name of him, who, dying like a king,
In his last hours did more for his own memory
Than many monarchs in a length of days,
Which date the flight of time, but make no annals.
Sar. Our annals draw perchance unto their close;
But at the least, whate'er the past, their end
Shall be like their beginning-memorable.
Zar. Yet, be not rash-be careful of your life,
Live but for those who love.

Sar.
And who are they?
A slave, who loves from passion-I'll not say
Ambition-she has seen thrones shake, and loves;
A few friends who have revell'd till we are
As one, for they are nothing if I fall;
A brother I have injured-children whom
I have neglected, and a spouse-
Zar.

Sar. And pardons? Zar.

Who loves.

I cherish

Sar. Oh! thou wilt hear it from my subjects. YesThese slaves whom I have nurtured, pamper'd, fed, And swoln with peace, and gorged with plenty, till They reign themselves-all monarchs in their man

Turn poison in bad minds.

Sar.

Sal.

And good ones make Good out of evil. Happier than the bee, Which hives not but from wholesome flowers.

Sar.

My gentle, wrong'd Zarina! (1)
I am the very slave of circumstance
And impulse-borne away with every breath!
Misplaced upon the throne-misplaced in life.
I know not what I could have been, but feel
I am not what I should be-let it end.
But take this with thee: if I was not form'd
To prize a love like thine, a mind like thine,
Nor dote even on thy beauty-as I've doted
On lesser charms, for no cause save that such
Devotion was a duty, and I hated

All that look'd like a chain for me or others
(This even rebellion must avouch); yet hear
These words, perhaps among my last-that none
E'er valued more thy virtues, though he knew not
To profit by them (2)—as the miner lights
Upon a vein of virgin ore, discovering

That which avails him nothing: he hath found it,
But 't is not his-but some superior's who
Placed him to dig, but not divide, the wealth
Which sparkles at his feet; nor dare he lift
Nor poise it, but must grovel on, upturning
The sullen earth.

Zar.
Oh! if thou hast at length
Discover'd that my love is worth esteem,
I ask no more-but let us hence together,
And I let me say we shall yet be happy.
Assyria is not all the earth-we'll find

A world out of our own-and be more bless'd
Than I have ever been, or thou, with all
An empire to indulge thee.

(1) "We are not sure whether there is not a consider. able violation of costume in the sense of degradation with which Myrrha seems to regard her situation in the harem, no less than in the resentment of Salemenes, and the remorse of Sardanapalus, on the score of his infidelity to Zarina. Little as we know of the domestic habits of Assyria, we have reason to conclude, from the habits of contemporary nations, and from the manners of the East in every age, that polygamy was neither accounted a crime in itself, nor as a measure of which the principal wife was

Remain, and perish--

With my husband

Alas!

Zar. Sal. And children. Zar. Sal. Hear me, sister, like My sister-all's prepared to make your safety Certain, and of the boys too, our last hopes; 'Tis not a single question of mere feeling, Though that were much-but 't is a point of state: The rebels would do more to seize upon The offspring of their sovereign, and so crushZar. Ah! do not name it. Sal. Well, then, mark me: when They are safe beyond the Median's grasp, the rebels Have miss'd their chief aim-the extinction of The line of Nimrod. Though the present king Fall, his sons live for victory and vengeance. Zar. But could not I remain, alone? Sal.

What! leave Your children, with two parents and yet orphansIn a strange land-so young, so distant? Zar.

My heart will break.

No

Sal. Now you know all-decide. Sar. Zarina, he hath spoken well, and we Must yield a while to this necessity. Remaining here, you may lose all; departing, You save the better part of what is left, To both of us, and to such loyal hearts As yet beat in these kingdoms.

Sal.

The time presses.

Sar. Go, then. If e'er we meet again, perhaps
I may be worthier of you-and, if not,
Remember that my faults, though not atoned for,
Are ended. Yet, I dread thy nature will
Grieve more above the blighted name and ashes
Which once were mightiest in Assyria-than-
But I grow womanish again, and must not;
I must learn sternness now. My sins have all
Been of the softer order- -hide thy tears—
I do not bid thee not to shed them-'t were
Easier to stop Euphrates at its source
Than one tear of a true and tender heart-
But let me not behold them; they unman me
Here when I had remann'd myself. My brother,
Lead her away.

Zar.
Oh, God! I never shall
Behold him more!

fobey'd

Sal. (striving to conduct her). Nay, sister, I must be Zar. I must remain-away! you shall not hold me. What, shall he die alone?-I live alone? Sal. He shall not die alone; but lonely you Have lived for years.

Zar.

That's false! I knew he lived,

And lived upon his image-let me go!
Sal. (conducting her off the stage). Nay, then, I
must use some fraternal force,
Which you will pardon.

justified in complaining. And even in Greece,-in those times when Myrrha's character must have been formed.to be a captive, and subject to the captor's pleasure, was accounted a misfortune indeed, but could hardly be regarded as an infamy. But where is the critic who would object to an inaccuracy which has given occasion to such sentiments and such poetry?" Heber.-L. E.

(2) "It is impossible to read this speech without a conviction that it was written at Lady Byron." Gall.-P. F.