Page:The Works of Lord Byron (ed. Coleridge, Prothero) - Volume 2.djvu/94

60 I strike my strain, far distant, to applaud

Beauties that ev'n a cynic must avow;

Match me those Houries, whom ye scarce allow

To taste the gale lest Love should ride the wind,

With Spain's dark-glancing daughters—deign to know,

There your wise Prophet's Paradise we find,

His black-eyed maids of Heaven, angelically kind.

LX.

Oh, thou Parnassus! whom I now survey, N13

Not in the phrensy of a dreamer's eye,

Not in the fabled landscape of a lay,

But soaring snow-clad through thy native sky,

In the wild pomp of mountain-majesty!

What marvel if I thus essay to sing?

The humblest of thy pilgrims passing by

Would gladly woo thine Echoes with his string,

Though from thy heights no more one Muse will wave her wing.