60
CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE.
[CANTO I.
I strike my strain, far distant, to applaud
Beauties that ev'n a cynic must avow;[1]
Match me those Houries, whom ye scarce allow
To taste the gale lest Love should ride the wind,
With Spain's dark-glancing daughters—deign to know,
There your wise Prophet's Paradise we find,
His black-eyed maids of Heaven, angelically kind.
LX.
Oh, thou Parnassus! whom I now survey,[2]N13
Not in the phrensy of a dreamer's eye,
Not in the fabled landscape of a lay,[3]
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.
- ↑ Beauties that need not fear a broken vow.—[MS. erased.]
—— a lecher's vow.—[MS.] - ↑ [The summit of Parnassus is not visible from Delphi or the neighbourhood. Before he composed "these stanzas" (December 16), (see note 13.B.) at the foot of Parnassus, Byron had first surveyed its "snow-clad" majesty as he sailed towards Vostizza (on the southern shore of the Gulf of Corinth), which he reached on the 5th, and quitted on the 14th of December. "The Echoes" (line 8) which were celebrated by the ancients (Justin, Hist., lib. xxiv. cap. 6), are those made by the Phædriades, or "gleaming peaks," a "lofty precipitous escarpment of red and grey limestone" at the head of the valley of the Pleistus, facing southwards.—Travels in Albania, i. 188, 199; Geography of Greece, by H. F. Tozer, 1873, p. 230.]
- ↑ Not in the landscape of a fabled lay.—[MS. D.]
