Page:The Works of Lord Byron (ed. Coleridge, Prothero) - Volume 6.djvu/248

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When amatory poets sing their loves In liquid lines mellifluously bland, And pair their rhymes as Venus yokes her doves, They little think what mischief is in hand ; The greater their success the worse it proves, As Ovid's verse may give to understand ; Even Petrarch's self, if judged with due severity, Is the Platonic pimp of all posterity. II. I therefore do denounce all amorous writing. Except in such a way as not to attract ; Plain — simple — short, and by no means inviting, But with a moral to each error tacked. Formed rather for instructing than delighting. And with all passions in their turn attacked ; Now, if my Pegasus should not be shod ill, This poem will become a moral model. III. The European with the Asian shore Sprinkled with palaces — the Ocean stream ^ . [Canto V. was begun at Ravenna, October the i6th, and finished November the 20th, 1820. It was published August 8, 1821, together with Cantos III. and IV.] . This expression of Homer has been much criticized. It hardly answers to our Atlantic ideas of the ocean, but is sufficiently applicable to the Hellespont, and the Bosphorus, with the ^gean intersected with islands. [Vide Iliad, xiv. 245, etc. Homer's "ocean-stream" was not the