X.
My name from out the temple where the dead
Are honoured by the Nations—let it be—
And light the Laurels on a loftier head!
And be the Spartan's epitaph on me—
"Sparta hath many a worthier son than he."[1]
Meantime I seek no sympathies, nor need—
The thorns which I have reaped are of the tree
I planted,—they have torn me,—and I bleed:
I should have known what fruit would spring from such a seed.
XI.
The spouseless Adriatic mourns her Lord,[2]
And annual marriage now no more renewed—
The Bucentaur[3] lies rotting unrestored,
- ↑ The answer of the mother of Brasidas, the Lacedæmonian general, to the strangers who praised the memory of her son.
[Βρασίδας γὰρ ἦν μὲν ἀνὴρ ἀγαθὸς, πολλοὶ δ' ἐκείνου κρείσσονες ἐν τῇ Σπάρτῃ. Plutarchi Moralia, Apophthegmata Laconica (Tauchnitz, 1820), ii. 127.]
- ↑ The widowed Adriatic mourns her Doge.—[MS. M. erased.]
- ↑ [The Bucentaur, "the state barge in which, on Ascension Day, the Doge of Venice used to wed the Adriatic by dropping a ring into it," was broken up and rifled by the French in 1797 (note, by Rev. E. C. Owen, Childe Harold, 1897, p. 197).
Compare Goethe's "Letters from Italy," October 5, 1786: "To give a notion of the Bucentaur in one word, I should say that it is a state-galley. The older one, of which we still have drawings, justified this appellation still more than
