An envy of the isles, a pleasure-house
Made sacred to his sister and his spouse.
It scarce seems now a Wreck of human art,
But, as it were Titanic; in the heart
Of Earth having assumed its form, then grown
Out of the mountains, from the living stone,
Lifting itself in caverns light and high:
For all the antique and learned imagery
Has been erased, and in the place of it
The ivy and the wild-vine interknit
The volumes of their many twining stems;
Parasite flowers illume with dewy gems
The lampless halls, and when they fade, the sky
Peeps through their winter-woof of tracery
With Moon-light patches, or star atoms keen,
Or fragments of the day's intense serene;-
Working mosaic on their Parian floors.
And, day and night, aloof, from the high towers
And terraces, the Earth and Ocean seem

To sleep in one another's arms, and dream

Possessing and possest by all that is
Within that calm circumference of bliss,
And by each other, till to love and live
Be one:-or, at the noontide hour, arrive
Where some old cavern hoar seems yet to keep
The moonlight of the expired night asleep,
Through which the awaken'd day can never peep;
A veil for our seclusion, close as Night's,
Where secure sleep may kill thine innocent liglits;
Sleep, the fresh dew of languid love, the rain
Whose drops quench kisses till they burn again.
And we will talk, until thought's melody
Become too sweet for utterance, and it die
In words, to live again in looks, which dart
With thrilling tone into the voiceless heart,
Harmonizing silence without a sound.

Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound,
And our veins beat together; and our lips,
With other eloquence than words, eclipse
The soul that burns between them; and the wells

This isle and house are mine, and I have vow'd
Thee to be lady of the solitude.-
And I have fitted up some chambers there,
Looking towards the golden Eastern air,
And level with the living winds, which flow
Like waves above the living waves below.-
I have sent books and music there, and all
Those instruments with which high spirits call
The future from its cradle, and the past
Out of its grave, and make the present last
In thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die,
Folded within their own eternity.

Our simple life wants little, and true taste
Hires not the pale drudge Luxury, to waste
The scene it would adorn; and therefore still,
Nature, with all her children, haunts the hill.
The ring-dove, in the embowering ivy, yet
Keeps up her love-lament, and the owls flit
Round the evening tower, and the young stars glance
Between the quick bats in their twilight dance;
The spotted deer bask in the fresh moon-light
Before our gate, and the slow, silent night
Is measured by the pants of their calm sleep.
Be this our home in life, and when years heap
Their wither'd hours, like leaves, on our decay,
Let us become the over-hanging day,
The living soul of this Elysian isle,
Conscious, inseparable, one. Meanwhile
We two will rise, and sit, and walk together,
Under the roof of blue Ionian weather,
And wander in the meadows, or ascend
The mossy mountains, where the blue heavens bend
With lightest winds, to touch their paramour;
Or linger, where the pebble-paven shore,
Under the quick, faint kisses of the sea,
Trembles and sparkles as with ecstacy, -

The fountains of our deepest life, shall be
Confused in passion's golden purity,
As mountain-springs under the morning Sun.
We shall become the same, we shall be one
Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two?
One passion in twin-hearts, which grows and grew,
Till, like two meteors of expanding flame,
Those spheres instinct with it become the same,
Touch, mingle, are transfigured; ever still
Burning, yet ever inconsumable:

In one another's substance finding food,
Like flames too pure and light and unimbued
To nourish their bright lives with baser prey,
Which point to Heaven and cannot pass away:
One hope within two wills, one will beneath
Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death,
One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality,
And one annihilation. Woe is me!

The winged words on which my soul would pierce
Into the height of love's rare Universe,
Are chains of lead around its flight of fire.-
I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!

Weak verses, go, kneel at your Sovereign's feet, And say:- We are the masters of thy slave; What wouldest thou with us and ours and thine?. Then call your sisters from Oblivion's cave, All singing loud: Love's very pain is sweet, But its reward is in the world divine Which, if not here, it builds beyond the grave.» So shall ye live when I am there. Then haste Over the hearts of men, until ye meet Marina, Vanna, Primus, and the rest, And bid them love each other and be blest: And leave the troop which errs, and which reproves, And come and be my guest, for I am Love's.

of the revolution eight hundred students, and among them several Germans and Americans. The munificence and energy of many of the Greek Princes and merchants, directed to the renovation of their country with a spirit and a wisdom which has few examples, is above all praise.

The English permit their own oppressors to act according to their natural sympathy with the Turkish tyrant, and to brand upon their name the indelible blot of an alliance with the enemies of domestic happiness, of Christianity and civilization.

Russia desires to possess, not to liberate Greece; and is contented to see the Turks, its natural enemies, and the Greeks, its intended slaves, enfeeble each other, until one or both fall into its net. The wise and generous policy of England would have consisted in establishing the independence of Greece and in maintaining it both against Russia and the Turk';-but when was the oppressor generous or just?

The Spanish Peninsula is already free. France is tranquil in the enjoyment of a partial exemption, from the abuses which its unnatural and feeble government are vainly attempting to revive. The seed of blood and misery has been sown in Italy, and a more vigorous race is arising to go forth to the harvest. The world waits only the news of a revolution of Germany, to see the tyrants who have pinnacled themselves on its supineness precipitated into the ruin from which they shall never arise. Well do these destroyers of mankind know their enemy, when they impute the insurrection in Greece to the same spirit before which they tremble throughout the rest of Europe; and that enemy well knows the power and cunning of its opponents, and watches the moment of their approaching weakness and inevitable division, to wrest the bloody sceptres grom their grasp.

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ.

MAHMUD.

HASSAN.

DAOOD.

AHASUERUS, a Jew.

CHORUS of Greek captive Women.

Messengers, Slaves, and Attendants.

SCENE, Constantinople. TIME,-Sunset.

HELLAS.

SCENE, a Terrace on the Seraglio. MAHMUD (sleeping), an Indian Slave sitting beside his

Couch.

CHORUS OF GREEK CAPTIVE WOMEN.

We strew these opiate flowers

On thy restless pillow,

They were stript from Orient bowers,

By the Indian billow.

Be thy sleep

Calm and deep,

Like theirs who fell-not ours who weep!

Its unwearied wings could fan
The quenchless ashes of Milan.1
From age to age, from man to man
It lived; and lit from land to land
Florence, Albion, Switzerland:
Then night fell; and as from night
Re-assuming fiery flight,
From the West swift Freedom came,
Against the course of heaven and doom
A second sun array'd in flame;

To burn, to kindle, to illume,
From far Atlantis its young beams
Chased the shadows and the dreams.
France, with all her sanguine steams,

Hid, but quench'd it not; again
Through clouds its shafts of glory rain
From utmost Germany to Spain.
As an eagle fed with morning
Scorns the embattled tempest's warning,
When she seeks her aery hanging

In the mountain cedar's hair,
And her brood expect the clanging
Of her wings through the wild air,
Sick with famine-Freedom so
To what of Greece remaineth now
Returns; her hoary ruins glow
Like orient mountains lost in day;
Beneath the safety of her wings
Her renovated nurselings play,
And in the naked lightnings
Of truth they purge their dazzled eyes.
Let Freedom leave, where'er she flies,
A desert, or a Paradise;

Let the beautiful and the brave
Share her glory, or a grave.

SEMICHORUS I.

With the gifts of gladness

Greece did thy cradle strew.

SEMICHORUS II.

With the tears of sadness

Greece did thy shroud bedew.

SEMICHORUS I.

With an orphan's affection

She follow'd thy bier through time;

SEMICHORUS II.

And at thy resurrection

Re-appeareth, like thou, sublime!

SEMICHORUS I.

If Heaven should resume thee,

To Heaven shall her spirit ascend;

SEMICHORUS II.

If Hell should entomb thee;

To Hell shall her high hearts bend.

SEMICHORUS I.

If Annihilation

Milan was the centre of the resistance of the Lombard league against the Austrian tyrant. Frederic Barbarossa burnt the city to the ground, but liberty lived in its ashes, and it rose like an ex

halation from its ruin.-See SISMONDI'S Histoires des Républiques

Italiennes, a book which has done much towards awakening the Italians to an imitation of their great ancestors.

The times do cast strange shadows

On those who watch and who must rule their course,
Lest they, being first in peril as in glory,
Be whelm'd in the fierce ehb:-and these are of them.
Thrice has a gloomy vision haunted me
As thus from sleep into the troubled day;
It shakes me as the tempest shakes the sea,
Leaving no figure upon memory's glass.

Would that no matter. Thou didst say thou knewest
A Jew, whose spirit is a chronicle

Of strange and secret and forgotten things.
I bade thee summon him:-'t is said his tribe
Dream, and are wise interpreters of dreams.

HASSAN.

The Jew of whom I spake is old,-so old
He seems to have outlived a world's decay;
The hoary mountains and the wrinkled ocean
Seem younger still than he;-his hair and beard
Are whiter than the tempest-sifted snow;
His cold pale limbs and pulseless arteries
Are like the fibres of a cloud instinct
With light, and to the soul that quickens them
Are as the atoms of the mountain-drift

To the winter wind:-but from his eye looks forth
A life of unconsumed thought, which pierces
The present, and the past, and the to-come.
Some say that this is he whom the great prophet
Jesus, the son of Joseph, for his mockery
Mock'd with the curse of immortality.
Some feign that he is Enoch; others dream
He was pre-adamite, and has survived
Cycles of generation and of ruin.
The sage, in truth, by dreadful abstinence
And conquering penance of the mutinous flesh,
Deep contemplation, and unwearied study,
In years outstretch'd beyond the date of man,
May have obtain'd to sovereignty and science

Made known to him, where he dwells in a sea-cavern 'Mid the Demonesi, less accessible

Than thou or God! He who would question him
Must sail alone at sun-set, where the stream
Of ocean sleeps around those foamless isles
When the young moon is westering as now,
And evening airs wander upon the wave;
And when the pines of that bee-pasturing isle,
Green Erebinthus, quench the fiery shadow
Of his gilt prow within the sapphire water;
Then must the lonely helmsman cry aloud,
Ahasuerus! and the caverns round
Will answer, Ahasuerus! If his prayer
Be granted, a faint meteor will arise,
Lighting him over Marmora, and a wind
Will rush out of the sighing pine-forest,
And with the wind a storm of harmony
Unutterably sweet, and pilot him
Through the soft twilight to the Bosphorus:
Thence, at the hour and place and circumstance
Fit for the matter of their conference,
The Jew appears. Few dare, and few who dare,
Win the desired communion-but that shout
Bodes--

MAHMUD.

[A shout without.

And Death's dark chasm hurrying to and fro,
Clothe their unceasing flight
In the brief dust and light

Gather'd around their chariots as they go;

New shapes they still may weave,
New Gods, new laws receive;

Bright or dim are they, as the robes they last
On Death's bare ribs had cast.

A power from the unknown God;
A Promethean conqueror came;
Like a triumphal path he trod

The thorns of death and shame.
A mortal shape to him
Was like the vapour dim

Which the orient planet animates with light;
Hell, Sin and Slavery came,
Like blood-hounds mild and tame,

Nor prey'd until their lord had taken flight.
The moon of Mahomet
Arose, and it shall set:

While blazon'd as on heaven's immortal noon
The cross leads generations on.

Swift as the radiant shapes of sleep

From one whose dreams are paradise,
Fly when the fond wretch wakes to weep,
And day peers forth with her blank eyes!
So fleet, so faint, so fair,
The powers of earth and air

Fled from the folding star of Bethlehem:
Apollo, Pan, and Love,
And even Olympian Jove

Grew weak, for killing Truth had glared on them.
Our hills, and seas, and streams,
Dispeopled of their dreams,

Their waters turn'd to blood, their dew to tears,
Wail'd for the golden years.

Enter MAHMUD, HASSAN, DAOOD, and others.

exalted existence, according to the degree of perfection which every distinct intelligence may have attained. Let it not be supposed that I mean to dogmatize upon a subject concerning which all men are equally ignorant, or that I think the Gordian knot of the origin of evil can be disentangled by that or any similar assertions. The received hypothesis of a Being resembling men in the moral attributes of his nature, having called us out of non-existence, and after inflicting on us the misery of the commission of error, should superadd that of the punishment and the privations consequent upon it, still would remain inexplicable and incredible. That there is a true solution of the riddle, and that in our present state that solution is unattainable by us, are propositions which may be regarded as equally certain; meanwhile, as it is the province of the poet to attach himself to those ideas which exalt and ennoble humanity, let him be permitted to have conjectured the condition of that futurity towards which we are all impelled by an inextinguishable thirst for immortality. Until better arguments can be produced than sophisms which disgrace the cause, this desire itself must remain the strongest and the only presumption that eternity is the nheritance of every thinking being.