Lord Byron

Manfred (With Byron's Biography)


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climbing moon."

      Act iii. sc. 3, line 40.]

      [The following is the passage from Plutarch: "It is related that when Pausanias was at Byzantium, he cast his eyes upon a young virgin named Cleonice, of a noble family there, and insisted on having her for a mistress. The parents, intimidated by his power, were under the hard necessity of giving up their daughter. The young woman begged that the light might be taken out of his apartment, that she might go to his bed in secresy and silence. When she entered he was asleep, and she unfortunately stumbled upon the candlestick, and threw it down. The noise waked him suddenly, and he, in his confusion, thinking it was an enemy coming to assassinate him, unsheathed a dagger that lay by him, and plunged it into the virgin's heart. After this he could never rest. Her image appeared to him every night, and with a menacing tone repeated this heroic verse—

      'Go to the fate which pride and lust prepare!'

      The allies, highly incensed at this infamous action, joined Cimon to besiege him in Byzantium. But he found means to escape thence; and, as he was still haunted by the spectre, he is said to have applied to a temple at Heraclea, where the manes of the dead were consulted. There he invoked the spirit of Cleonice, and entreated her pardon. She appeared, and told him 'he would soon be delivered from all his troubles, after his return to Sparta:' in which, it seems, his death was enigmatically foretold." "Thus," adds the translator in a note, "we find that it was a custom in the pagan as well as in the Hebrew theology to conjure up the spirits of the dead, and that the witch of Endor was not the only witch in the world."—Langhorne's Plutarch, 1838, p. 339.

      The same story is told in the Periegesis Græcæ, lib. iii. cap. xvii., but Pausanias adds, "This was the deed from the guilt of which Pausanias could never fly, though he employed all-various purifications, received the deprecations of Jupiter Phyxius, and went to Phigalea to the Arcadian evocators of souls."—Descr. of Greece (translated by T. Taylor), 1794, i. 304, 305.]

      "But I have seen the soaring Jungfrau rear

       Her never-trodden snow."

      Childe Harold, Canto IV. stanza lxxiii. lines 6, 7.

      Byron did not know, or ignored, the fact that the Jungfrau was first ascended in 1811, by the brothers Meyer, of Aarau.]

      "And who commanded (and the silence came)

       Here let the billows stiffen and have rest?

      Motionless torrents! silent cataracts."

      Hymn before Sunrise, etc., by S.T. Coleridge, lines 47, 48, 53.

      "Arrived at the Grindenwald; dined, mounted again, and rode to the higher Glacier—twilight, but distinct—very fine Glacier, like a frozen hurricane" (Letters, 1899, iii. 360).]

      "Freedom ne'er shall want an heir;

      When once more her hosts assemble,

       Tyrants shall believe and tremble—

       Smile they at this idle threat?

       Crimson tears will follow yet."

      Ode from the French, v. 8, 11-14. Poetical Works, 1900, iii. 435.

      Compare, too, Napoleon's Farewell, stanza 3, ibid., p. 428. The "Voice" prophesies that St. Helena will prove a second Elba, and that Napoleon will "live to fight another day."]