Page:The Works of Lord Byron (ed. Coleridge, Prothero) - Volume 3.djvu/91

VERSES FOUND IN A SUMMER-HOUSE AT HALES-OWEN.^{[decimal 1]}

When Dryden's fool, "unknowing what he sought,"
His hours in whistling spent, "for want of thought,"^{[decimal 2]}
This guiltless oaf his vacancy of sense
Supplied, and amply too, by innocence:
Did modern swains, possessed of Cymon's powers,
In Cymon's manner waste their leisure hours,
Th' offended guests would not, with blushing, see
These fair green walks disgraced by infamy.
Severe the fate of modern fools, alas!
When vice and folly mark them as they pass.
Like noxious reptiles o'er the whitened wall,
The filth they leave still points out where they crawl.
[First published 1832, vol. xvii.]

 

REMEMBER THEE! REMEMBER THEE!^{[decimal 3]}

1.
Remember thee! remember thee!
Till Lethe quench life's burning stream

Notes

1. [The Leasowes, the residence of the poet Shenstone, is near the village of Halesowen, in Shropshire.]
2. [See Dryden's Cymon and Iphigenia, lines 84, 85.]
3. [The sequel of a temporary liaison formed by Lord Byron during his career in London, occasioned this impromptu. On the cessation of the connection, the fair one [Lady C. Lamb: see Letters, 1898, ii. 451] called one morning at her quondam lover's apartments. His Lordship was from home; but finding Vathek on the table, the lady wrote in the first page of the volume the words, "Remember me!" Byron immediately wrote under the ominous warning these two stanzas.—Conversations of Lord Byron, by Thomas Medwin, 1824, pp. 329, 330. In Medwin's work the euphemisms false and fiend are represented by asterisks.]