CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE. CANTO THE SECOND. I. - COME, blue-eyed maid of heaven!—but thou, alas! Of men who never felt the sacred glow slow, That thoughts of thee and thine on polish'd breasts bestow. (") (1) Part of the Acropolis was destroyed by the explosion of a magazine during the Venetian siege. (2) We can all feel, or imagine, the regret with which the ruins of cities, once the capitals of empires, are beheld: the reflections suggested by such objects are too trite to require recapitulation. But never did the littleness of man, and the vanity of his very best virtues, of patriotism to exalt, and of valour to defend his country, appear more conspicuous than in the record of what Athens was, and the certainty of what she now is. This theatre of contention between mighty factions, of the struggles of orators, the exaltation and deposition of tyrants, the triumph and punishment of generals, is now become a scene of petty intrigue and perpetual disturbance, between the bickering agents of certain British nobility and gentry. "The wild foxes, the owls and serpents in the ruins of Babylon," were surely less degrading than such inhabitants. The Turks have the plea of conquest for their tyranny, and the Greeks have only suffered the fortune of war, incidental to the bravest; but how are the mighty fallen, when two painters contest the privilege of plundering the Parthenon, and triumph in turn, according to the tenor of each succeeding firman! Sylla could but punish, Philip subdue, and Xerxes burn Athens; but it remained for the paltry antiquarian, and his despicable agents, to render her contemptible as himself and his pursuits. The Parthenon, before its destruction in part, by fire du ring the Venetian siege, had been a temple, a church, and a mosque. In each point of view it is an object of regard: it changed its worshippers; but still it was a pace of worship thrice sacred to devotion: its violation is a triple sacrilege. But "Man, vain man, Drest in a little brief authority, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven 4* Ancient of days! august Athena! where, Where are thy men of might? thy grand in sou Gone - glimmering through the dream of thing First in the race that led to Glory's goal, They won, and pass'd away is this the whole A schoolboy's tale, the wonder of an hour! The warrior's weapon and the sophist's stole Are sought in vain, and o'er each mouldering to Dim with the mist of years, gray flits the shade of Son of the morning, rise! approach you here! Come-but molest not yon defenceless urn: Look on this spot - a nation's sepulchre ! Abode of gods, whose shrines no longer burn. Even gods must yield - religions take their turn 'Twas Jove's-'tis Mahomet's-and other cree Will rise with other years, till man shall lea.n Vainly his incense soars, his victim bleeds; Poor child of Doubt and Death, whose hope is buil (1) It was not always the custom of the Greeks to burn their dead; Ajax, in particular, was interred entire. Almost all the chiefs became their decease; and he was indeed neglected, who had not annual gam tomb, or festivals in honour of his memory by his countrymen, as Achilles, &c. and at last even Antinous, whose death was as heroic as his life was Where demi-gods appear'd, as records tell. VI. Look on its broken arch, its ruin'd wall, And Passion's host, that never brook'd control: VII. Well didst thou speak, Athena's wisest son! There no forced banquet claims the sated guest, VIII. Yet if, as holiest men have deem'd, there be With those who made our mortal labours light! The Bactrian, Samian sage, and all who taught the right! IX. There, thou! - whose love and life together fled, Have left me here to love and live in vain Twined with my heart, and can I deem thee dead And woo the vision to my vacant breast: If aught of young Remembrance then remain, For me 'twere bliss enough to know thy spirit blest! X. Here let me sit upon this massy stone, The marble column's yet unshaken base; XI. But who, of all the plunderers of yon fane The last, the worst, dull spoiler, who was he? Thy free-born men should spare what once was free, XII. But most the modern Pict's ignoble boast, To rive what Goth, and Turk, and Time hath spared ; (") Cold as the crags upon his native coast, His mind as barren and his heart as hard, Is he whose head conceived, whose hand prepared, Aught to displace Athena's poor remains Her sons too weak the sacred shrine to guard, Yet felt some portion of their mother's pains, (*) And never knew, till then, the weight of Despot's chains. (1) The temple of Jupiter Olympius, of which sixteen columns, entirely of mar ble, yet survive: originally there were 150. These columns, however, are by ma ny supposed to belong to the Pantheon. (2) The ship was wrecked in the Archipelago. piaced here. (3) See Appendix to this Canto [A], for a note too long to (4) I cannot resist availing myself of the permission of my friend Dr. Clarke, whose name requires no comment with the public, but whose sanction will add ten fold weight to my testimony, to insert the following extract from a very obliging letter of his to me, as a note to the above lines. "When the last of the Metopes was taken from the Parthenon, and, in moving of it, great part of the superstructure with |