And should a noble Monarch reign, If worth can recommend you. 14. Yet since in danger courts abound, From snares may Saints preserve you ; But those who best deserve you! 15. Not for a moment may you stray May no delights decoy! O'er roses may your footsteps move, 16. Oh! if you wish that happiness Your coming days and years may bless, And virtues crown your brow; Be still as you were wont to be, Spotless as you've been known to me,- Be still as you are now.1 1. ["Of all I have ever known, Clare has always been the least altered in everything from the excellent qualities and kind affections which attached me to him so strongly at 17. And though some trifling share of praise, To me were doubly dear; To prove a Prophet here. 1807. I WOULD I WERE A CARELESS CHILD. I. I WOULD I were a careless child, Still dwelling in my Highland cave, i. Stanzas. [Poems O. and T.] school. I should hardly have thought it possible for society (or the world, as it is called) to leave a being with so little of the leaven of bad passions. I do not speak from personal experience only, but from all I have ever heard of him from others, during absence and distance."-Detached Thoughts, Nov. 5, 1821; Life, p. 540.] 1. Sassenach, or Saxon, a Gaelic word, signifying either Lowland or English. 2. Fortune! take back these cultur'd lands, I hate the slaves that cringe around: Place me among the rocks I love, Which sound to Ocean's wildest roar; I ask but this again to rove Through scenes my youth hath known before. 3. Few are my years, and yet I feel The World was ne'er design'd for me: The hour when man must cease to be? Truth!—wherefore did thy hated beam 4. I lov'd-but those I lov'd are gone; Had friends-my early friends are fled: How cheerless feels the heart alone, When all its former hopes are dead! Though gay companions, o'er the bowl Dispel awhile the sense of ill; Though Pleasure stirs the maddening soul, The heart-the heart-is lonely still. 5. How dull! to hear the voice of those Whom Rank or Chance, whom Wealth or Power, Have made, though neither friends nor foes, Associates of the festive hour. Give me again a faithful few, In years and feelings still the same, And I will fly the midnight crew, Where boist'rous Joy is but a name. 6. And Woman, lovely Woman! thou, This busy scene of splendid Woe, Which Virtue knows, or seems to know. 7. Fain would I fly the haunts of men 1– I seek to shun, not hate mankind; 1. [Shyness was a family characteristic of the Byrons. The poet continued in later years to have a horror of being observed by unaccustomed eyes, and in the country would, if possible, avoid meeting strangers on the road.] My breast requires the sullen glen, Which bear the turtle to her nest! LINES WRITTEN BENEATH AN ELM IN THE SPOT of my youth! whose hoary branches sigh, i. Lines written beneath an Elm In the Churchyard of Harrow on the Hill September 2, 1807.-[Poems O. and T.] 1. "And I said, O that I had wings like a dove, for then would I fly away, and be at rest."-Psalm lv. 6. This verse also constitutes a part of the most beautiful anthem in our language. 66 2. [On the death of his daughter, Allegra, in April, 1822, Byron sent her remains to be buried at Harrow, "where," he says, in a letter to Murray, "I once hoped to have laid my own." "There is," he wrote, May 26, a spot in the churchyard, near the footpath, on the brow of the hill looking towards Windsor, and a tomb under a large tree (bearing the name of Peachie, or Peachey), where I used to sit for hours and hours when a boy. This was my favourite spot; but as I wish to erect a tablet to her memory, the body had better be deposited in the church." No tablet was, however, erected, and Allegra sleeps in her unmarked grave inside the church, a few feet to the right of the entrance.] |