Page:The Works of Lord Byron (ed. Coleridge, Prothero) - Volume 4.djvu/177



I.

years!—It tries the thrilling frame to bear

And eagle-spirit of a Child of Song—

Long years of outrage—calumny—and wrong;

Imputed madness, prisoned solitude,

And the Mind's canker in its savage mood,

When the impatient thirst of light and air

Parches the heart; and the abhorred grate,

Marring the sunbeams with its hideous shade,

Works through the throbbing eyeball to the brain,

With a hot sense of heaviness and pain;

And bare, at once, Captivity displayed