Page:The Works of Lord Byron (ed. Coleridge, Prothero) - Volume 4.djvu/232

194 And the harsh sound of the barbarian drum,

With dull and daily dissonance, repeats

The echo of thy Tyrant's voice along

The soft waves, once all musical to song,

That heaved beneath the moonlight with the throng

Of gondolas —and to the busy hum

Of cheerful creatures, whose most sinful deeds

Were but the overbeating of the heart,

And flow of too much happiness, which needs

The aid of age to turn its course apart

From the luxuriant and voluptuous flood

Of sweet sensations, battling with the blood.

But these are better than the gloomy errors,

The weeds of nations in their last decay,

When Vice walks forth with her unsoftened terrors,

And Mirth is madness, and but smiles to slay;

And Hope is nothing but a false delay,

The sick man's lightning half an hour ere Death,

When Faintness, the last mortal birth of Pain,

And apathy of limb, the dull beginning

Of the cold staggering race which Death is winning,

Steals vein by vein and pulse by pulse away;

Yet so relieving the o'er-tortured clay,

To him appears renewal of his breath,

And freedom the mere numbness of his chain;

And then he talks of Life, and how again

He feels his spirit soaring—albeit weak,

And of the fresher air, which he would seek;

And as he whispers knows not that he gasps,

That his thin finger feels not what it clasps,

And so the film comes o'er him—and the dizzy

Chamber swims round and round—and shadows busy,

At which he vainly catches, flit and gleam,

Till the last rattle chokes the strangled scream,

And all is ice and blackness,—and the earth

That which it was the moment ere our birth.