And thy light broke on human eyes,
Like a Volcano of the skies.

3.

Like lava rolled thy stream of blood,
And swept down empires with its flood;
Earth rocked beneath thee to her base,
As thou didst lighten through all space;
And the shorn Sun grew dim in air,
And set while thou wert dwelling there.

4.

Before thee rose, and with thee grew,
A rainbow of the loveliest hue

Of three bright colours,1 each divine,
And fit for that celestial sign;

For Freedom's hand had blended them,
Like tints in an immortal gem.

5.

One tint was of the sunbeam's dyes ;
One, the blue depth of Seraph's eyes;
One, the pure Spirit's veil of white
Had robed in radiance of its light:
The three so mingled did beseem
The texture of a heavenly dream.

6.

Star of the brave! thy ray is pale,
And darkness must again prevail !
But, oh thou Rainbow of the free!
Our tears and blood must flow for thee.
When thy bright promise fades away,
Our life is but a load of clay.

1. The tricolor.

7.

And Freedom hallows with her tread
The silent cities of the dead;
For beautiful in death are they
Who proudly fall in her array;
And soon, oh, Goddess! may we be
For evermore with them or thee!

[First published, Examiner, April 7, 1816.]

STANZAS FOR MUSIC.

I.

THEY say that Hope is happiness;

But genuine Love must prize the past, And Memory wakes the thoughts that bless : They rose the first-they set the last;

II.

And all that Memory loves the most
Was once our only Hope to be,
And all that Hope adored and lost
Hath melted into Memory.

III.

Alas! it is delusion all:

The future cheats us from afar,

Nor can we be what we recall,

Nor dare we think on what we are.

[First published, Fugitive Pieces, 1829.]

THE SIEGE OF CORINTH.

"Guns, Trumpets, Blunderbusses, Drums and Thunder." Pope, Sat. i. 26.1

1. [" With Gun, Drum, Trumpet, Blunderbuss, and Thunder."]

INTRODUCTION TO THE SIEGE OF CORINTH.

IN a note to the “Advertisement" to the Siege of Corinth (vide post, p. 447), Byron puts it on record that during the years 1809-10 he had crossed the Isthmus of Corinth eight times, and in a letter to his mother, dated Patras, July 30, 1810, he alludes to a recent visit to the town of Corinth, in company with his friend Lord Sligo. (See, too, his letter to Coleridge, dated October 27, 1815, Letters, 1899, iii. 228.) It is probable that he revisited Corinth more than once in the autumn of 1810; and we may infer that, just as the place and its surroundings-the temple with its "two or three columns" (line 497), and the view across the bay from Acro-Corinth-are sketched from memory, so the story of the siege which took place in 1715 is based upon tales and legends which were preserved and repeated by the grandchildren of the besieged, and were taken down from their lips. There is point and meaning in the apparently insignificant line (stanza xxiv. line 765), "We have heard the hearers say" (see variant i. p. 483), which is slipped into the description of the final catastrophe. It bears witness to the fact that the Siege of Corinth is not a poetical expansion of a chapter in history, but a heightened reminiscence of local tradition.

History has, indeed, very little to say on the subject. The anonymous Compleat History of the Turks (London, 1719), which Byron quotes as an authority, is meagre and inaccurate. Hammer-Purgstall (Histoire de l'Empire Ottoman, 1839, xiii. 269), who gives as his authorities Girolamo Ferrari and Raschid, dismisses the siege in a few lines; and it was not till the publication of Finlay's History of Greece