"He kneels at morn, and noon, and eve

He hath a cushion plump:

520

It is the moss that wholly hides

The rotted old oak stump.

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

66

Laughed loud and long, and all the while
His eyes went to and fro.

Ha ha!' quoth he, full plain I see,

The Devil knows how to row.'

"And now, all in my own countree,

570

I stood on the firm land!

The Hermit stepped forth from the boat,
And scarcely he could stand.

"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?'

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

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

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

600

605

610

615

620

Is gone; and now the Wedding-Guest
Turned from the Bridegroom's door.

He went like one that hath been stunned,

And is of sense forlorn :

A sadder and a wiser man
He rose, the morrow morn.

625

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

LXXXVII.

"Alas!"

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;

5

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