VIII. THE GREEKS AT THERMOPYLE.-BYRON. THEY fell devoted, but undying; The věry gale their names seemed sighing; Claimed kindred with their sacred clay : II. 126. GREECE. E who hath bent him o'er the dead, Ere the first day of death is fled, The first dark day of nothingness, The last of danger and distress, Before Decay's effacing fingers Have swept the lines where beauty lingers, The rapture of repose, that's there, And but for that sad, shrouded eye, The doom he dreads, yet dwells upon→ Yes, but for these, and these ǎlone, Some moments, ay, one treacherous hour,- That parts not quite with parting breath; A gilded halo hovering round decay, 3. Clime of the unforgotten brave! 1 Whose land from plain to mountain-cave 1 Ther mŏp ́ ý læ, a famous pass of Greece, about five miles long, and originally from 50 to 60 yards in width. It is hemmed in on one side by precipitous rocks of from 400 to 600 feet in height, and on the other side by the sea and an impassable Here Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans died in defending Greece against the invasion morass. of Xerxes, B. C. 489. 'Săl' a mis, an island of Greece, in the Gulf of Ægina, ten miles W. of Athens. Its shape is very irreg ular; the surface is mountainous and wooded in some parts. In the channel between it and the main land, the Greeks, under Themistocles, gained a memorable naval victory over the Persians, B. C. 480. 1 Arise, and make again your own : 4. Bear witness, Greece, thy living page! Thy heroes, though the general doom III. 127. SONG OF THE GREEKS, 1822. GAIN to the battle, Achaians!1 Our hearts bid the tyrants defiance; Our land, the first garden of Liberty's tree,— BYRON. It has been, and shall yět be, the land of the free ; For the cross of our faith is replanted, The pale dying crescent is daunted, Achaians, (a kd' anz), the people of Achaia, a department of the king. dom of Greece. And we march that the footprints of Ma'homet's' slaves And the sword shall to glory restore us. 2. Ah! what though no succor advances, Are stretched in our aid?-Be the combat our own! Or that, dying, our deaths shall be glorious. The sword that we've drawn we will sheathe not: Earth may hide, waves engulf, fire consume us; If they rule, it shall be o'er our ashes and graves :- And new triumphs on land are befōre us ;— 4. This day-shall ye blush for its story; If a coward there be that would slacken Till we've trampled the turban, and shown ourselves worth 1 Mā' hom ět, a false prophet of Arabia, who, by the mere force of his genius and his convictions, subdued many nations to his religion, his laws and his scepter; and whose authority at the present time is acknowledged by nearly two hundred millions of souls. He was born in 570, and died on the 8th of July, 632. 5. Old Greece lightens up with emotion! Her inlands, her isles of the ocean, Fanes rebuilt, and fair towns, shall with jubilee ring, That were cold, and extinguished in sadness; Shall have crimsoned the beaks of our ravens! THOMAS CAMPBELL. Α IV. 128. MARCO BOZZARIS. T midnight, in his guarded tent, A was The Turk was dreaming of the hour In dreams, through camp and court, he bōre In dreams, his song of triumph heard ; Then pressed that monarch's throne,-a king; As Eden's garden bird. 2. At midnight, in the forest shades, Bozzaris' ranged his Suliote band, True as the steel of their tried blades, There had the Persian's thousands stood, 1Hělí con, a famous mountain in Boeotia, in Greece, from which flows a fountain, and where resided the Muses. ? Marco Bozzaris, (bôt' så ris), a Suliote of Arnaout and Greek descent, was born in 1789. He was early involved in revolutionary movements. His most brilliant exploit is the one here described, in which, with a handful of five hundred Suliotes, at midnight, August 20th, 1823, he surprised a Turkish army of twenty thousand men, fought his way to the very tent of the commander-in-chief, and was killed by a random shot, while making the pasha prisoner. The victory, however, was complete. |