CANTO I.]
CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE.
53
XLVI.
But all unconscious of the coming doom,[1]
The feast, the song, the revel here abounds;
Strange modes of merriment the hours consume,
Nor bleed these patriots with their country's wounds:
Nor here War's clarion, but Love's rebeck[2] sounds;[3]
Here Folly still his votaries inthralls;
And young-eyed Lewdness walks her midnight rounds:[4]
Girt with the silent crimes of Capitals,
Still to the last kind Vice clings to the tott'ring walls.
XLVII.
Not so the rustic—with his trembling mate
He lurks, nor casts his heavy eye afar,
Lest he should view his vineyard desolate,
Blasted below the dun hot breath of War.
No more beneath soft Eve's consenting star
- ↑ [Byron, en route for Gibraltar, passed three days at Seville at the end of July or the beginning of August, 1809. By the end of January, 1810, the French had appeared in force before Seville. Unlike Zaragoza and Gerona, the pleasure-loving city, "after some negotiations, surrendered, with all its stores, foundries, and arsenal complete, and on the 1st of February the king [Joseph] entered in triumph" (Napier's History of the War in the Peninsula, ii. 295).]
- ↑ A kind of fiddle with only two strings, played on by a bow, said to have been brought by the Moors into Spain.
- ↑ Not here the Trumpet, but the rebeck sounds.—[MS. erased.]
- ↑ And dark-eyed Lewdness ——.—[MS. erased.]
- ↑ [See The Waltz: Poetical Works, 1898, i. 492, note 1.]
