66

"The skiff-boat neared: I heard them talk,

The planks looked warped! and see those sails,

How thin they are and sere!

530

I never saw aught like to them,

Unless perchance it were

"Brown skeletons of leaves that lag My forest-brook along;

When the ivy-tod is heavy with snow,

And the owlet whoops to the wolf below,
That eats the she-wolf's young.'

535

540

Laughed loud and long, and all the while

His eyes went to and fro.

"O shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man!' The Hermit crossed his brow.

575

Say quick,' quoth he, I bid thee say— What manner of man art thou?'

66

"O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been
Alone on a wide, wide sea:

So lonely 'twas, that God himself
Scarce seemed there to be.

"O sweeter than the marriage feast,

'Tis sweeter far to me,

To walk together to the kirk

With a goodly company!.

"To walk together to the kirk,

And all together pray,

While each to his great Father bends,

Old men, and babes, and loving friends,
And youths and maidens gay!

"Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.

"He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all."

The Mariner, whose eye is bright,
Whose beard with age is hoar,

600

605

610

615

BYRON.

[MODERN GREECE.]

CHILDE HAROLD, CANTO II

LXXXV.

AND yet how lovely in thine age of woe,
Land of lost gods and godlike men — art thou!
Thy vales of evergreen, thy hills of snow,
Proclaim thee Nature's varied favourite now;
Thy fanes, thy temples to thy surface bow,
Commingling slowly with heroic earth,
Broke by the share of every rustic plough:
So perish monuments of mortal birth,

So perish all in turn, save well-recorded Worth;

LXXXVI.

Save where some solitary column mourns
Above its prostrate brethren of the cave;
Save where Tritonia's airy shrine adorns
Colonna's cliff, and gleams along the wave;
Save o'er some warrior's half-forgotten grave,
Where the gray stones and unmolested grass
Ages, but not oblivion, feebly brave,

While strangers only not regardless pass,

Lingering like me, perchance, to gaze, and sigh "Alas!"

LXXXVII.

Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild:

Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy fields,

Thine olive ripe as when Minerva smiled,
And still his honey'd wealth Hymettus yields;