Scene: A Terrace on the Seraglio. Mahmud Sleeping, an Indian Slave Sitting Beside His Couch

Hellas.

Dramatis Personae:

Mahmud. Hassan. Daood. Ahasuerus, a Jew. Chorus of Greek Captive Women. [the Phantom of Mahomet II. (Omitted, Edition 1822.)] Messengers, Slaves, and Attendants.

Scene: Constantinople.

Time: Sunset.

CHORUS OF GREEK CAPTIVE WOMEN:
We strew these opiate flowers
On thy restless pillow,—
They were stripped from Orient bowers,
By the Indian billow.
Be thy sleep _5
Calm and deep,
Like theirs who fell—not ours who weep!

INDIAN:
Away, unlovely dreams!
Away, false shapes of sleep
Be his, as Heaven seems, _10
Clear, and bright, and deep!
Soft as love, and calm as death,
Sweet as a summer night without a breath.

CHORUS:
Sleep, sleep! our song is laden
With the soul of slumber; _15
It was sung by a Samian maiden,
Whose lover was of the number
Who now keep
That calm sleep
Whence none may wake, where none shall weep. _20

INDIAN:
I touch thy temples pale!
I breathe my soul on thee!
And could my prayers avail,
All my joy should be
Dead, and I would live to weep, _25
So thou mightst win one hour of quiet sleep.

CHORUS:
Breathe low, low
The spell of the mighty mistress now!
When Conscience lulls her sated snake,
And Tyrants sleep, let Freedom wake. _30
Breathe low—low
The words which, like secret fire, shall flow
Through the veins of the frozen earth—low, low!

SEMICHORUS 1:
Life may change, but it may fly not;
Hope may vanish, but can die not; _35
Truth be veiled, but still it burneth;
Love repulsed,—but it returneth!

SEMICHORUS 2:
Yet were life a charnel where
Hope lay coffined with Despair;
Yet were truth a sacred lie, _40
Love were lust—

SEMICHORUS 1:
If Liberty
Lent not life its soul of light,
Hope its iris of delight,
Truth its prophet’s robe to wear,
Love its power to give and bear. _45

CHORUS:
In the great morning of the world,
The Spirit of God with might unfurled
The flag of Freedom over Chaos,
And all its banded anarchs fled,
Like vultures frighted from Imaus, _50
Before an earthquake’s tread.—
So from Time’s tempestuous dawn
Freedom’s splendour burst and shone:—
Thermopylae and Marathon
Caught like mountains beacon-lighted, _55
The springing Fire.—The winged glory
On Philippi half-alighted,
Like an eagle on a promontory.
Its unwearied wings could fan
The quenchless ashes of Milan. _60
From age to age, from man to man,
It lived; and lit from land to land
Florence, Albion, Switzerland.

Then night fell; and, as from night,
Reassuming fiery flight, _65
From the West swift Freedom came,
Against the course of Heaven and doom.
A second sun arrayed in flame,
To burn, to kindle, to illume.
From far Atlantis its young beams _70
Chased the shadows and the dreams.
France, with all her sanguine steams,
Hid, but quenched it not; again
Through clouds its shafts of glory rain
From utmost Germany to Spain. _75
As an eagle fed with morning
Scorns the embattled tempest’s warning,
When she seeks her aerie hanging
In the mountain-cedar’s hair,
And her brood expect the clanging _80
Of her wings through the wild air,
Sick with famine:—Freedom, so
To what of Greece remaineth now
Returns; her hoary ruins glow
Like Orient mountains lost in day; _85
Beneath the safety of her wings
Her renovated nurslings prey,
And in the naked lightenings
Of truth they purge their dazzled eyes.
Let Freedom leave—where’er she flies, _90
A Desert, or a Paradise:
Let the beautiful and the brave
Share her glory, or a grave.

NOTES: _77 tempest’s]tempests edition 1822. _87 prey edition 1822; play editions 1839.

SEMICHORUS 1:
With the gifts of gladness
Greece did thy cradle strew; _95

SEMICHORUS 2:
With the tears of sadness
Greece did thy shroud bedew!

SEMICHORUS 1:
With an orphan’s affection
She followed thy bier through Time;

SEMICHORUS 2:
And at thy resurrection _100
Reappeareth, like thou, sublime!

SEMICHORUS 1:
If Heaven should resume thee,
To Heaven shall her spirit ascend;

SEMICHORUS 2:
If Hell should entomb thee,
To Hell shall her high hearts bend. _105

SEMICHORUS 1:
If Annihilation—

SEMICHORUS 2:
Dust let her glories be!
And a name and a nation
Be forgotten, Freedom, with thee!

INDIAN:
His brow grows darker—breathe not—move not! _110
He starts—he shudders—ye that love not,
With your panting loud and fast,
Have awakened him at last.

MAHMUD [STARTING FROM HIS SLEEP]:
Man the Seraglio-guard! make fast the gate!
What! from a cannonade of three short hours? _115
’Tis false! that breach towards the Bosphorus
Cannot be practicable yet—who stirs?
Stand to the match; that when the foe prevails
One spark may mix in reconciling ruin
The conqueror and the conquered! Heave the tower _120
Into the gap—wrench off the roof!
[ENTER HASSAN.]
Ha! what!
The truth of day lightens upon my dream
And I am Mahmud still.

HASSAN:
Your Sublime Highness
Is strangely moved.

MAHMUD:
The times do cast strange shadows
On those who watch and who must rule their course, _125
Lest they, being first in peril as in glory,
Be whelmed in the fierce ebb:—and these are of them.
Thrice has a gloomy vision hunted me
As thus from sleep into the troubled day;
It shakes me as the tempest shakes the sea, _130
Leaving no figure upon memory’s glass.
Would that—no matter. Thou didst say thou knewest
A Jew, whose spirit is a chronicle
Of strange and secret and forgotten things.
I bade thee summon him:—’tis said his tribe _135
Dream, and are wise interpreters of dreams.

HASSAN:
The Jew of whom I spake is old,—so old
He seems to have outlived a world’s decay;
The hoary mountains and the wrinkled ocean
Seem younger still than he;—his hair and beard _140
Are whiter than the tempest-sifted snow;
His cold pale limbs and pulseless arteries
Are like the fibres of a cloud instinct
With light, and to the soul that quickens them
Are as the atoms of the mountain-drift _145
To the winter wind:—but from his eye looks forth
A life of unconsumed thought which pierces
The Present, and the Past, and the To-come.
Some say that this is he whom the great prophet
Jesus, the son of Joseph, for his mockery, _150
Mocked with the curse of immortality.
Some feign that he is Enoch: others dream
He was pre-adamite and has survived
Cycles of generation and of ruin.
The sage, in truth, by dreadful abstinence _155
And conquering penance of the mutinous flesh,
Deep contemplation, and unwearied study,
In years outstretched beyond the date of man,
May have attained to sovereignty and science
Over those strong and secret things and thoughts _160
Which others fear and know not.

MAHMUD:
I would talk
With this old Jew.

HASSAN:
Thy will is even now
Made known to him, where he dwells in a sea-cavern
‘Mid the Demonesi, less accessible
Than thou or God! He who would question him _165
Must sail alone at sunset, where the stream
Of Ocean sleeps around those foamless isles,
When the young moon is westering as now,
And evening airs wander upon the wave;
And when the pines of that bee-pasturing isle, _170
Green Erebinthus, quench the fiery shadow
Of his gilt prow within the sapphire water,
Then must the lonely helmsman cry aloud
‘Ahasuerus!’ and the caverns round
Will answer ‘Ahasuerus!’ If his prayer _175
Be granted, a faint meteor will arise
Lighting him over Marmora, and a wind
Will rush out of the sighing pine-forest,
And with the wind a storm of harmony
Unutterably sweet, and pilot him _180
Through the soft twilight to the Bosphorus:
Thence at the hour and place and circumstance
Fit for the matter of their conference
The Jew appears. Few dare, and few who dare
Win the desired communion—but that shout _185
Bodes—