THE CURSE OF MINERVA.
Pallas te hoc Vulnere Pallas
Immolat et pœnam scelerato ex Sanguine Sumit.
Athens: Capuchin Convent, March 17, 1811.
Slow sinks, more lovely ere his race be run,[1]
Along Morea's hills the setting Sun;
Not, as in northern climes, obscurely bright,
But one unclouded blaze of living light;
O'er the hushed deep the yellow beam he throws,[2]
Gilds the green wave that trembles as it glows;
- ↑ [The lines (1-54) with which the Satire begins, down to "As thus, within the walls of Pallas' fane," first appeared (1814) as the opening stanza of the Third Canto of The Corsair. At that time the publication of The Curse of Minerva had been abandoned. (See Byron's note to The Corsair, Canto III. st. i. line 1.)]
- ↑ O'er the blue ocean way his.—[MS.][^]
↑ [The only MS. of The Curse of Minerva which the editor has seen, is in the possession of the Earl of Stanhope. A second MS., formerly in the possession of the Duke of Newcastle, is believed to have perished in a fire which broke out at Clumber in 1879.] - ↑ [Idra; The Corsair, III. st. i. line 7. Hydra, or Hydrea, is an island on the east coast of the Peloponnese, between the gulfs of Nauplia and Ægina. As an "isle of Greece" it had almost no history until the War of Independence, when its chief town became a "city of refuge" for the inhabitants of the Morea and Northern Greece. Byron was, perhaps, the first poet to give it a name in song.]
