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9.

While wand'ring through each broken path, O'er brake and craggy brow;

While elements exhaust their wrath,

Sweet Florence, where art thou?

10.

Not on the sea, not on the sea,
Thy bark hath long been gone:

Oh, may the storm that

pours on me,

Bow down my head alone!

11.

Full swiftly blew the swift Siroc,
When last I pressed thy lip;

And long ere now with foaming shock
Impell'd thy gallant ship.

12.

Now thou art safe; nay, long ere now Hast trod the shore of Spain;

"Twere hard if ought so fair as thou Should linger on the main.

13.

And since I now remember thee
In darkness and in dread,
As in those hours of revelry.

Which mirth and music sped;

14.

Do thou amidst the fair white walls,

If Cadiz yet be free,

At times from out her lattic'd halls

Look o'er the dark blue sea;

15.

Then think upon Calypso's isles
Endear'd by days gone by,

To others give a thousand smiles,
To me a single sigh.

16.

And when the admiring circle mark
The paleness of thy face,

A half form'd tear, a transient spark

Of melancholy grace,

17.

Again thou❜lt smile, and blushing shun

Some coxcomb's raillery;

Nor own for once thou thought'st of one,

Who ever thinks on thee.

18.

Though smile and sigh alike are vain,
When sever❜d hearts repine,

My spirit flies o'er mount and main,
And mourns in search of thine.

V.

Written at Athens.

JANUARY 16, 1810.

THE spell is broke, the charm is flown!
Thus is it with life's fitful fever:
We madly smile when we should groan;
Delirium is our best deceiver.

Each lucid interval of thought

Recalls the woes of Nature's charter, And he that acts as wise men ought,

But lives, as saints have died, a martyr.

VI.

Written after swimming from Sestos to Abydos.

MAY 9, 1810.

1.

If in the month of dark December
Leander, who was nightly wont

(What maid will not the tale remember?)

To cross thy stream, broad Hellespont!

*On the 3d of May, 1810, while the Salsette frigate (Captain Bathurst) was lying in the Dardanelles, Lieutenant Ekenhead of that frigate and the writer of these rhymes swam from the European shore to the Asiatic-by-the-by, from Abydos to Sestos would have been more correct. The whole distance from the place whence we started to our land¡ng on the other side, including the length we were carried by the current, was computed by those on board the frigate at upwards of four English miles;, though the actual breadth is barely one. The rapidity

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