334
CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE.
[CANTO IV.
A country with—aye, or without mankind;
Yet was I born where men are proud to be,—
Not without cause; and should I leave behind[1]
The inviolate Island of the sage and free,
And seek me out a home by a remoter sea,[2]
IX.
Perhaps I loved it well; and should I lay
My ashes in a soil which is not mine,
My Spirit shall resume it—if we may[3]
Unbodied choose a sanctuary.[4] I twine
My hopes of being remembered in my line
With my land's language: if too fond and far
These aspirations in their scope incline,—
If my Fame should be, as my fortunes are,
Of hasty growth and blight, and dull Oblivion bar
- ↑ ——and though I leave behind.—[MS. M.]
- ↑ And make myself a home beside a softer sea.—[MS. erased.]
- ↑
——to pine
Albeit is not my nature, and I twine.—[MS. M. erased.] - ↑ [In another mood he wrote to Murray (June 7, 1819), "I trust they won't think of 'pickling, and bringing me home to Clod or Blunderbuss Hall' [see The Rivals, act v. sc. 3]. I am sure my bones would not rest in an English grave, or my clay mix with the earth of that country." In this half-humorous outburst he deprecates, or pretends to deprecate, the fate which actually awaited his remains—burial in the family vault at Hucknall Torkard. There is, of course, no reference to a public funeral and a grave in Westminster Abbey. In the next stanza (x. line 1) he assumes the possibility of his being excluded from the Temple of Fame; but there is, perhaps, a tacit reference to burial in the Abbey. If the thought, as is probable, occurred to him, he veils it in a metaphor.]
