Page:The Works of Lord Byron (ed. Coleridge, Prothero) - Volume 1.djvu/248

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208
HOURS OF IDLENESS.

My breast requires the sullen glen,
Whose gloom may suit a darken'd mind.
Oh! that to me the wings were given,
Which bear the turtle to her nest!
Then would I cleave the vault of Heaven,
To flee away, and be at rest.[1]


LINES WRITTEN BENEATH AN ELM IN THE CHURCHYARD OF HARROW[2][3]

Spot of my youth! whose hoary branches sigh,
Swept by the breeze that fans thy cloudless sky;
Where now alone I muse, who oft have trod,

With those I loved, thy soft and verdant sod;
  1. "And I said, O that I had wings like a dove, for then would I fly away, and be at rest."—Psalm lv. 6. This verse also constitutes a part of the most beautiful anthem in our language.
  2. Lines written beneath an Elm
    In the
    Churchyard of Harrow on the Hill
    September 2, 1807.—[Poems O. and T.]
  3. [On the death of his daughter, Allegra, in April, 1822, Byron sent her remains to be buried at Harrow, "where," he says, in a letter to Murray, "I once hoped to have laid my own." "There is," he wrote, May 26, "a spot in the churchyard, near the footpath, on the brow of the hill looking towards Windsor, and a tomb under a large tree (bearing the name of Peachie, or Peachey), where I used to sit for hours and hours when a boy. This was my favourite spot; but as I wish to erect a tablet to her memory, the body had better be deposited in the church." No tablet was, however, erected, and Allegra sleeps in her unmarked grave inside the church, a few feet to the right of the entrance.]