Page:The Works of Lord Byron (ed. Coleridge, Prothero) - Volume 2.djvu/308

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
272
CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE.
[CANTO III.

XC.

Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt[1]
In solitude, where we are least alone;
A truth, which through our being then doth melt,
And purifies from self: it is a tone,
The soul and source of Music, which makes known[2]
Eternal harmony, and sheds a charm
Like to the fabled Cytherea's zone,[3]
Binding all things with beauty;—'twould disarm
The spectre Death, had he substantial power to harm.


XCI.

Not vainly did the early Persian make[4]

His altar the high places, and the peak

    represents as inherent in Nature, that "sense of something far more deeply interfused," which Wordsworth (in his Lines on Tintern Abbey) assigns to his own consciousness.]

  1. It is a voiceless feeling chiefly felt.—[MS.]
  2. Of a most inward music——.—[MS.]
  3. [As the cestus of Venus endowed the wearer with magical attraction, so the immanence of the Infinite and the Eternal in "all that formal is and fugitive," binds it with beauty and produces a supernatural charm which even Death cannot resist.]
  4. [Compare Herodotus, i. 131, Οἱ δὲ νομίζουσι Διὶ μὲν, ἐπὶ τὰ ἱψηλότατα τῶν οὐρέων ἀναβαίνοντες, θυσίας ἕρδειν, τὸν κύκλον πάντα τοῦ οὐρανοῦ Δία καλέοντες. Perhaps, however, "early Persian" was suggested by a passage in "that drowsy, frowsy poem, The Excursion"—

    "The Persian—zealous to reject
    Altar and image and the inclusive walls
    And roofs and temples built by human hands—
    To loftiest heights ascending, from their tops
    With myrtle-wreathed tiara on his brow,
    Presented sacrifice to moon and stars."

    The Excursion, iv. (The Works of Wordsworth, 1889, p. 461).]