"Strike-till the last armed foe expires; Strike for your altars and your fires; Strike-for the green graves of your sires, God, and your native land!"
They fought-like brave men, long and well; They piled that ground with Moslem slain: They conquered-but Bozzaris fell,
Bleeding at every vein.
His few surviving comrades saw
His smile when rang their proud hurrah, And the red field was won;
Then saw in death his eyelids close Calmly, as to a night's repose,
Like flowers at set of sun.
Come to the bridal-chamber, Death, Come to the mother, when she feels, For the first time, her first-born's breath; Come when the blessèd seals
That close the pestilence are broke, And crowded cities wail its stroke; Come in consumption's ghastly form, The earthquake shock, the ocean storm; Come when the heart beats high and warm
With banquet song and dance and wine,— And thou art terrible; the tear,
The groan, the knell, the pall, the bier,
And all we know, or dream, or fear
Of agony, are thine.
But to the hero, when his sword
Has won the battle for the free, Thy voice sounds like a prophet's word, And in its hollow tones are heard
The thanks of millions yet to be. Come when his task of fame is wrought; Come with her laurel-leaf, blood-bought; Come in her crowning hour,—and then Thy sunken eye's unearthly light To him is welcome as the sight
Of sky and stars to prisoned men; Thy grasp is welcome as the hand Of brother in a foreign land; Thy summons welcome as the cry That told the Indian isles were nigh
To the world-seeking Genoese, When the land-wind, from woods of palm, And orange-groves, and fields of balm, Blew o'er the Haytian seas.
Bozzaris! with the storied brave Greece nurtured in her glory's time, Rest thee; there is no prouder grave, Even in her own proud clime.
She wore no funeral-weeds for thee,
Nor bade the dark hearse wave its plume, Like torn branch from death's leafless tree, In sorrow's pomp and pageantry,
The heartless luxury of the tomb.
But she remembers thee as one Long loved, and for a season gone.
For thee her poet's lyre is wreathed, Her marble wrought, her music breathed; For thee she rings the birthday bells; Of thee her babe's first lisping tells; For thine her evening prayer is said At palace couch and cottage bed. Her soldier, closing with the foe, Gives for thy sake a deadlier blow; His plighted maiden, when she fears For him, the joy of her young years, Thinks of thy fate, and checks her tears. And she, the mother of thy boys, Though in her eye and faded cheek Is read the grief she will not speak,
The memory of her buried joys,— And even she who gave thee birth,— Will, by her pilgrim-circled hearth,
Talk of thy doom without a sigh; For thou art Freedom's now, and Fame's,One of the few, the immortal names,
That were not born to die.
My hair is gray, but not with years,
Nor grew it white
In a single night,
As men's have grown from sudden fears; My limbs are bow'd, though not with toil, But rusted with a vile repose,
For they have been a dungeon's spoil, And mine has been the fate of those To whom the goodly earth and air Are bann'd, and barr'd-forbidden fare; But this was for my father's faith I suffer'd chains and courted death; That father perish'd at the stake For tenets he would not forsake; And for the same his lineal race In darkness found a dwelling-place; We were seven-who now are one, Six in youth, and one in age, Finish'd as they had begun,
Proud of Persecution's rage; One in fire, and two in field, Their belief with blood have seal'd, Dying as their father died, For the God their foes denied; Three were in a dungeon cast,
Of whom this wreck is left the last.
There are seven pillars of Gothic mould, In Chillon's dungeons deep and old, 'There are seven columns, massy and gray, Dim with a dull imprison'd ray,
A sunbeam which hath lost its way, And through the crevice and the cleft Of the thick wall is fallen and left; Creeping o'er the floor so damp, Like a marsh's meteor-lamp: And in each pillar there is a ring,
And in each ring there is a chain;
That iron is a cankering thing,
For in these limbs its teeth remain, With marks that will not wear away, Till I have done with this new day, Which now is painful to these eyes, Which have not seen the sun so rise For years I cannot count them o'er, I lost their long and heavy score, When my last brother droop'd and died, And I lay living by his side.
They chain'd us each to a column stone, And we were three-yet, each alone; We could not move a single pace, We could not see each other's face, But with that pale and livid light That made us strangers in our sight: And thus together-yet apart, Fetter'd in hand, but join'd in heart, 'T was still some solace, in the dearth Of the pure elements of earth, To hearken to each other's speech, And each turn comforter to each With some new hope, or legend old, Or song heroically bold;
But even these at length grew cold. Our voices took a dreary tone, An echo of the dungeon stone,
A grating sound, not full and free, As they of yore were wont to be: It might be fancy, but to me They never sounded like our own.
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