The Works of Lord Byron Volume V Part 133

_Caesar_. It is The land of Song--and Canticles you know Were once my avocation.

_Arn._ Nothing moves you; You scoff even at your own calamity-- And such calamity! how wert thou fallen 20 Son of the Morning! and yet Lucifer Can smile.

_Caes._ His shape can--would you have me weep, In the fair form I wear, to please you?

_Arn._ Ah!

_Caes._ You are grave--what have you on your spirit!

_Arn._ Nothing.

_Caes._ How mortals lie by instinct! If you ask A disappointed courtier--What's the matter?

"Nothing"--an outshone Beauty what has made Her smooth brow crisp--"Oh, Nothing!"--a young heir When his Sire has recovered from the Gout, What ails him? "Nothing!" or a Monarch who 30 Has heard the truth, and looks imperial on it-- What clouds his royal aspect? "Nothing," "Nothing!"

Nothing--eternal nothing--of these nothings All are a lie--for all to them are much!

And they themselves alone the real "Nothings."

Your present Nothing, too, is something to you-- What is it?

_Arn._ Know you not?

_Caes._ I only know What I desire to know! and will not waste Omniscience upon phantoms. Out with it!

If you seek aid from me--or else be silent. 40 And eat your thoughts--till they breed snakes within you.

_Arn._ Olimpia!

_Caes._ I thought as much--go on.

_Arn._ I thought she had loved me.

_Caes._ Blessings on your Creed!

What a good Christian you were found to be!

But what cold Sceptic hath appalled your faith And transubstantiated to crumbs again The _body_ of your Credence?

_Arn._ No one--but-- Each day--each hour--each minute shows me more And more she loves me not--

_Caes._ Doth she rebel?

_Arn._ No, she is calm, and meek, and silent with me, 50 And coldly dutiful, and proudly patient-- Endures my Love--not meets it.

_Caes._ That seems strange.

You are beautiful and brave! the first is much For pa.s.sion--and the rest for Vanity.

_Arn._ I saved her life, too; and her Father's life, And Father's house from ashes.

_Caes._ These are nothing.

You seek for Grat.i.tude--the Philosopher's stone.

_Arn._ And find it not.

_Caes._ You cannot find what is not.

But _found_ would it content you? would you owe To thankfulness what you desire from Pa.s.sion? 60 No! No! you would be _loved_--what you call loved-- _Self-loved_--loved for _yourself_--for neither health, Nor wealth, nor youth, nor power, nor rank, nor beauty-- For these you may be stript of--but _beloved_ As an abstraction--for--you know not what!

These are the wishes of a moderate lover-- And _so_ you love.

_Arn._ Ah! could I be beloved, Would I ask wherefore?

_Caes._ Yes! and not believe The answer--You are jealous.

_Arn._ And of whom?

_Caes._ It may be of yourself,[252] for Jealousy 70 Is as a shadow of the Sun. The Orb Is mighty--as you mortals deem--and to Your little Universe seems universal; But, great as He appears, and is to you, The smallest cloud--the slightest vapour of Your humid earth enables you to look Upon a Sky which you revile as dull; Though your eyes dare not gaze on it when cloudless.

Nothing can blind a mortal like to light.

Now Love in you is as the Sun--a thing 80 Beyond you--and your Jealousy's of Earth-- A cloud of your own raising.

_Arn._ Not so always!

There is a cause at times.

_Caes._ Oh, yes! when atoms jostle, The System is in peril. But I speak Of things you know not. Well, to earth again!

This precious thing of dust--this bright Olimpia-- This marvellous Virgin, is a marble maid-- An Idol, but a cold one to your heat Promethean, and unkindled by your torch.

_Arn._ Slave!

_Caes._ In the victor's Chariot, when Rome triumphed, 90 There was a Slave of yore to tell him truth!

You are a Conqueror--command your Slave.

_Arn._ Teach me the way to win the woman's love.

_Caes._ Leave her.

_Arn._ Where that the path--I'd not pursue it.

_Caes._ No doubt! for if you did, the remedy Would be for a disease already cured.

_Arn._ All wretched as I am, I would not quit My unrequited love, for all that's happy.

_Caes._ You have possessed the woman--still possess.

What need you more?

_Arn._ To be myself possessed-- 100 To be her heart as she is mine.

FOOTNOTES:

[201] {473}[_The Three Brothers_, by Joshua Pickersgill, junior, was published in 1803. There is no copy of _The Three Brothers_ in the British Museum. The following extracts are taken from a copy in the Bodleian Library at Oxford (vol. 4, cap. xi. pp. 229-350):--

"Arnaud, the natural son of the Marquis de Souvricour, was a child 'extraordinary in Beauty and Intellect.' When travelling with his parents to Languedoc, Arnaud being 8 years old, he was shot at by banditti, and forsaken by his parents. The Captain of the band nursed him. 'But those perfections to which Arnaud owed his existence, ceased to adorn it. The ball had gored his shoulder, and the fall had dislocated it; by the latter misadventure his spine likewise was so fatally injured as to be irrecoverable to its pristine uprightness.

Injuries so compound confounded the Captain, who sorrowed to see a creature so charming, at once deformed by a crooked back and an excrescent shoulder.' Arnaud was found and taken back to his parents.

'The bitterest consciousness of his deformity was derived from their indelicate, though, perhaps, insensible alteration of conduct.... Of his person he continued to speak as of an abhorrent enemy.... "Were a blessing submitted to my choice, I would say, [said Arnaud] be it my immediate dissolution." "I think," said his mother, ... "that you could wish better." "Yes," adjoined Arnaud, "for that wish should be that I ever had remained unborn."' He polishes the broken blade of a sword, and views himself therein; the sight so horrifies him that he determines to throw himself over a precipice, but draws back at the last moment. He goes to a cavern, and conjures up the prince of h.e.l.l. "Arnaud knew himself to be interrogated. What he required.... What was that answer the effects explain.... There pa.s.sed in liveliest portraiture the various men distinguished for that beauty and grace which Arnaud so much desired, that he was ambitious to purchase them with his soul. He felt that it was his part to chuse whom he would resemble, yet he remained unresolved, though the spectator of an hundred shades of renown, among which glided by Alexander, Alcibiades, and Hephestion: at length appeared the supernatural effigy of a man, whose perfections human artist never could depict or insculp--Demetrius, the son of Antigonus.

Arnaud's heart heaved quick with preference, and strait he found within his hand the resemblance of a poniard, its point inverted towards his breast. A mere automaton in the hands of the Demon, he thrust the point through his heart, and underwent a painless death. During his trance, his spirit metempsychosed from the body of his detestation to that of his admiration ... Arnaud awoke a Julian!'"]

[202] {474}[For a _resume_ of M. G. Lewis's _Wood Demon_ (afterwards re-cast as _One O'clock; or, The Knight and the Wood-Demon_, 1811), see "First Visit to the Theatre in London," _Poems_, by Hartley Coleridge, 1851, i., Appendix C, pp. cxcix.-cciii. The _Wood Demon_ in its original form was never published.]