Goddess of Wisdom! here thy temple was,
And is, despite of War and wasting fire,N1
And years, that bade thy worship to expire:
But worse than steel, and flame, and ages slow,N2
Is the dread sceptre and dominion dire
Of men who never felt the sacred glow
That thoughts of thee and thine on polished breasts bestow.
II.
Ancient of days! august Athena! where,[1]
Where are thy men of might? thy grand in soul?
Gone—glimmering through the dream of things that were:[2]
First in the race that led to Glory's goal,
They won, and passed away—is this the whole?
- ↑ Ancient of days! august Athenæ! where.—[MS. D.]
- ↑ Gone—mingled with the waste ——.—[MS. erased.]
the humorous catastrophe of decay, the poet concludes with the Preacher "that there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave." After this profession of unfaith, before he returns to Harold and his pilgrimage, he takes up his parable and curses Elgin and all his works.
The passage as a whole suggests the essential difference between painting and poetry. As a composition, it recalls the frontispiece of a seventeenth-century classic. The pictured scene, with its superfluity of accessories, is grotesque enough; but the poetic scenery, inconsequent and yet vivid as a dream, awakens, and fulfills the imagination. (Travels in Albania, by Lord Broughton, 1858, i. 380; ii. 128, 129, 138; The Odyssey, xxiv. 74, sq. See, too, Byron's letters to his mother, April 17, and to H. Drury May 3, 1810: Letters, 1898, i. 262.)]
