That this is all remains of thee? Approach, thou craven crouching slave : Say, is not this Thermopyla? These waters blue that round you lave, Oh servile offspring of the freePronounce what sea, what shore is this? The gulf, the rock of Salamis ! These scenes, their story not unknown, Arise, and make again your own; Snatch from the ashes of your sires The embers of their former fires; And he who in the strife expires Will add to theirs a name of fear That Tyranny shall quake to hear, And leave his sons a hope, a fame, They too will rather die than shame : For Freedom's battle once begun, Bequeath'd by bleeding Sire to Son, Though baffled oft, is ever won. Bear witness, Greece, thy living page, Attest it many a deathless age! While kings, in dusty darkness hid, Have left a nameless pyramid, Thy heroes, though the general doom Hath swept the column from their tomb, A mightier monument command, The mountains of their native land! There points thy Muse to stranger's eye The graves of those that cannot die ! 'Twere long to tell and sad to trace, Each step from splendour to disgrace; Enough—no foreign foe could quell Thy soul, till from itself it fell ; Yes! Self-abasement paved the way To villain bonds and despot sway. THE SAME. (CHILDE HAROLD, Canto ii. Stanzas 73-77.) FAIR GREECE! sad relic of departed worth! Leap from Eurotas' banks, and call thee from the tomb? Spirit of freedom! when on Phyle's brow Thou sat'st with Thrasybulus and his train, Couldst thou forebode the dismal hour which now Dims the green beauties of thine Attic plain? Not thirty tyrants now enforce the chain, Trembling beneath the scourge of Turkish hand, From birth till death enslaved; in word, in deed, unmann'd. In all save form alone, how changed! and who And many dream withal the hour is nigh That gives them back their fathers' heritage : Nor solely dare encounter hostile rage, Or tear their name defiled from Slavery's mournful page. Hereditary bondsmen ! know ye not Who would be free themselves must strike the blow? Greece! change thy lords, thy state is still the same; Thy glorious day is o'er, but not thine years of shame. The city won for Allah from the Giaour, The Giaour from Othman's race again may wrest; Receive the fiery Frank, her former guest; The prophet's tomb of all its pious spoil, But slave succeed to slave through years of endless toil. THE SAME. (CHILDE HAROLD, Canto ii. Stanzas 84-88.) When riseth Lacedæmon's hardihood, : Can man its shatter'd splendour renovate, Recal its virtues back, and vanquish Time and Fate ? And yet how lovely in thine age of woe, Save where some solitary column mourns Save o'er some warrior's half-forgotten grave, While strangers only not regardless pass, Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild; Still in his beam Mendeli's marbles glare; Where'er we tread 'tis haunted, holy ground, No earth of thine is lost in vulgar mould, But one vast realm of wonder spreads around, And all the Muse's tales seem truly told, Till the sense aches with gazing to behold The scenes our earliest dreams have dwelt upon : Each hill and dale, each deepening glen and wold Defies the power which crush'd thy temples gone : Age shakes Athena's tower, but spares gray Marathon. |