Forthwith the oars with measured plash descended,
And all their lines, with dexterous speed displayed,
Stood with opposing front. The right wing first,
Then the whole fleet, bore down, and straight uprose
A mighty shout: "Sons of the Greeks, advance!
Your country free, your children free, your wives!
The altars of your native gods deliver,
And your ancestral tombs,

all's now at stake!" A like salute from our whole line back rolled In Persian speech. Nor more delay, but straight Trireme on trireme, brazen beak on beak, Dashed furious. A Greek ship led on the attack, And from the prow of a Phoenician struck The figure-head; and now the grapple closed Of each ship with his adverse desperate. At first the main line of the Persian fleet

Stood the harsh shock; but soon their multitude Became their ruin; in the narrow frith

They might not use their strength, and, jammed together,

Their ships with brazen beaks did bite each other,
And shattered their own oars. Meanwhile the
Greeks

Stroke after stroke dealt dexterous all around,
Till our ships showed their keels, and the blue sea
Was seen no more, with multitude of ships
And corpses covered. All the shores were strewn,
And the rough rocks, with dead: till, in the end,
Each ship in the barbaric host, that yet
Had oars, in most disordered flight rowed off.

τοὶ δ ̓ ὥστε θύννους ἤ τιν ̓ ἰχθύων βόλον
ἀγαῖσι κωπῶν θραύμασίν τ ̓ ἐρειπίων
ἔπαιον, ἐρράχιζον· οἰμωγὴ δ ̓ ὁμοῦ
κωκύμασιν κατεῖχε πελαγίαν ἅλα,
ἕως κελαινῆς νυκτὸς ὄμμ ̓ ἀφείλετο.
κακῶν δὲ πλῆθος, οὐδ ̓ ἂν εἰ δέκ ̓ ἤματα
στοιχηγοροίην, οὐκ ἂν ἐκπλήσαιμί σοι.
εὖ γὰρ τόδ ̓ ἴσθι, μηδάμ ̓ ἡμέρᾳ μι
πλῆθος τοσουτάριθμον ἀνθρώπων θανεῖν.

Glory in all her beauty, all her forms;
Seen her walk back with Theseus when he left
The bones of Sciron bleaching to the wind,
Above the ocean's roar and cormorant's flight,
So high that vastest billows from above
Show but like herbage waving in the mead;
Seen generations throng thy Isthmian games,
And pass away, — the beautiful, the brave,
And them who sang their praises.

But, O queen, Audible still, and far beyond thy cliffs,

As when they first were uttered, are those

words

As men that fish for tunnies, so the Greeks,
With broken booms, and fragments of the wreck,
Struck our snared men, and hacked them, that the

sea

With wail and moaning was possessed around, Till black-eyed Night shot darkness o'er the fray. These ills thou hearest: to rehearse the whole, Ten days were few; but this, my queen, believe, No day yet shone on earth whose brightness looked On such a tale of death.

Tr. by J. S. Blackie.

Divine which praised the valiant and the just;
And tears have often stopt, upon that ridge
So perilous, him who brought before his eye
The Colchian babes.

"Stay! spare him! save the last! Medea! — is that blood? again! it drops

From my imploring hand upon my feet!

I will invoke the Eumenides no more.

I will forgive thee,
In all thy wishes,
Tell me, one lives."

bless thee, bend to thee

do but thou, Medea,

"And shall I too deceive?"

Cries from the fiery car an angry voice;

And swifter than two falling stars.descend
Two breathless bodies, warm, soft, motionless,
As flowers in stillest noon before the sun,

They lie three paces from him, such they lie
As when he left them sleeping side by side,
A mother's arm round each, a mother's cheeks
Between them, flushed with happiness and love.
He was more changed than they were,
doomed to

show

Thee and the stranger, how defaced and scarred
Grief hunts us down the precipice of years,
And whom the faithless prey upon the last.

To give the inertest masses of our earth Her loveliest forms was thine, to fix the gods Within thy walls, and hang their tripods round With fruits and foliage knowing not decay. A nobler work remains: thy citadel

Invites all Greece; o'er lands and floods remote Many are the hearts that still beat high for thee: Confide then in thy strength, and unappalled Look down upon the plain, while yokemate kings Run bellowing, where their herdsmen goad them

on;

Instinct is sharp in them, and terror true,
They smell the floor whereon their necks must lie.
Walter Savage Landor.

Parnassus

(From Childe Harold, Canto I)

THOU Parnassus! whom I now survey, Not in the frenzy of a dreamer's eye, Not in the fabled landscape of a lay,

But soaring snow-clad through thy native sky,
In the wild pomp of mountain majesty!
What marvel if I thus essay to sing!

The humblest of thy pilgrims passing by
Would gladly woo thine echoes with his string,
Though from thy heights no more one Muse will
wave her wing.

Oft have I dreamed of thee! whose glorious name
Who knows not, knows not man's divinest lore:
And now I view thee, 'tis, alas! with shame
That I in feeblest accents must adore.
When I recount thy worshippers of yore
I tremble, and can only bend the knee;
Nor raise my voice, nor vainly dare to soar,
But gaze beneath thy cloudy canopy

In silent joy to think at last I look on thee!

Happier in this than mightiest bards have been, Whose fate to distant homes confined their lot, Shall I unmoved behold the hallow'd scene, Which others rave of, though they know it not? Though here no more Apollo haunts his grot, And thou, the Muses' seat, art now their grave,