The Works of Thomas Love Peacock

Hast thou, in some safe retreat,
Waked and watched, to hear the roar
Of breakers on the wind-swept shore?
Go forth at morn. The waves, that beat
Still rough and white when blasts are o'er,
May wash, all ghastly, to thy feet
Some victim of the midnight storm.
From that drenched garb and pallid form
Shrink not: but fix thy gaze, and see
Thy own congenial destiny.
For him, perhaps, an anxious wife
On some far coast o'erlooks the wave:
A child, unknowing of the strife
Of elements, to whom he gave
His last fond kiss, is at her breast:
The skies are clear, the seas at rest
Before her, and the hour is nigh
Of his return: but black the sky
To him, and fierce the hostile main,
Have been. He will not come again.
But yesterday, and life, and health,
And hope, and love, and power, and wealth,
Were his: to-day, in one brief hour,

Of all his wealth, of all his power,
He saved not, on his shattered deck,
A plank, to waft him from the wreck.
Now turn away, and dry thy tears,
And build long schemes for distant years!
Wreck is not only on the sea.
The warrior dies in victory:
The ruin of his natal roof
O'erwhelms the sleeping man: the hoof
Of his prized steed has struck with fate
The horseman in his own home gate:
The feast and mantling bowl destroy
The sensual in the hour of joy.
The bride from her paternal porch
Comes forth among her maids: the torch,
That led at morn the nuptial choir,
Kindles at night her funeral pyre.
Now turn away, indulge thy dreams,
And build for distant years thy schemes!

On Thracia's coast the morn was grey.
Anthemion, with the opening day,
From deep entrancement on the sands
Stood up. The magic maid was there
Beside him on the shore. Her hands
Still held the golden lyre: her hair
In all its long luxuriance hung
Unringleted, and glittering bright
With briny drops of diamond light:
Her thin wet garments lightly clung
Around her form's rare symmetry.

Like Venus risen from the sea
She seemed: so beautiful: and who
With mortal sight such form could view,
And deem that evil lurked beneath?
Who could approach those starry eyes,
Those dewy coral lips, that breathe
Ambrosial fragrance, and that smile
In which all Love's Elysium lies,
Who this could see, and dream of guile,
And brood on wrong and wrath the while?
If there be one, who ne'er has felt
Resolve, and doubt, and anger melt,
Like vernal night-frosts, in one beam
Of Beauty's sun, 'twere vain to deem,
Between the Muse and him could be
A link of human sympathy.

Fain would the youth his lips unclose
In keen reproach for all his woes
And his Calliroë's doom. In vain:
For closer now the magic chain
Of the inextricable spell
Involved him, and his accents fell
Perplexed, confused, inaudible.
And so awhile he stood. At length,
In painful tones, that gathered strength
With feeling's faster flow, he said:
—“What would'st thou with me, fatal maid?
That ever thus, by land and sea,
Thy dangerous beauty follows me?”—

She speaks in gentle accents low,
While dim through tears her bright eyes move:

—“Thou askest what thou well dost know;
I love thee, and I seek thy love.”—

—“My love! It sleeps in dust for ever
Within my lost Calliroë's tomb:
The smiles of living beauty never
May my soul's darkness re-illume.
We grew together, like twin flowers,
Whose opening buds the same dews cherish;
And one is reft, ere noon-tide hours,
Violently; one remains, to perish
By slow decay; as I remain
Even now, to move and breathe in vain.
The late, false love, that worldlings learn,
When hearts are hard, and thoughts are stern,
And feelings dull, and Custom's rule
Omnipotent, that love may cool,
And waste, and change: but this—which flings
Round the young soul its tendril rings,
Strengthening their growth and grasp with years,
Till habits, pleasures, hopes, smiles, tears,
All modes of thinking, feeling, seeing,
Of two congenial spirits, blend
In one inseparable being,—
Deem'st thou this love can change or end?
There is no eddy on the stream,
No bough that light winds bend and toss,
No chequering of the sunny beam
Upon the woodland moss,
No star in evening's sky, no flower
Whose beauty odorous breezes stir,
No sweet bird singing in the bower,

Nay, not the rustling of a leaf,
That does not nurse and feed my grief
By wakening thoughts of her.
All lovely things a place possessed
Of love in my Calliroë's breast:
And from her purer, gentler spirit,
Did mine the love and joy inherit,
Which that blest maid around her threw.
With all I saw, and felt, and knew,
The image of Calliroë grew,
Till all the beauty of the earth
Seemed as to her it owed its birth,
And did but many forms express
Of her reflected loveliness.
The sunshine and the air seemed less
The sources of my life: and how
Was she torn from me? Earth is now
A waste, where many echoes tell
Only of her I loved—how well
Words have no power to speak:—and thou—
Gather the rose-leaves from the plain
Where faded and defiled they lie,
And close them in their bud again,
And bid them to the morning sky
Spread lovely as at first they were:
Or from the oak the ivy tear,
And wreathe it round another tree
In vital growth: then turn to me,
And bid my spirit cling on thee,
As on my lost Calliroë!”—

—“The Genii of the earth, and sea,

And air, and fire, my mandates hear.
Even the dread Power, thy Ladon's fear,
Arcadian Dæmogorgon,

“The dreaded name of Dæmogorgon” is familiar to every reader, in Milton's enumeration of the Powers of Chaos. Mythological writers in general afford but little information concerning this terrible Divinity. He is incidentally mentioned in several places by Natalis Comes, who says, in treating of Pan, that Pronapides, in his Protocosmus, makes Pan and the three sister Fates the offspring of Dæmogorgon. Boccaccio, in a Latin treatise on the Genealogy of the Gods, gives some account of him on the authority of Theodotion and Pronapides. He was the Genius of the Earth, and the Sovereign Power of the Terrestrial Dæmons. He dwelt originally with Eternity and Chaos, till, becoming weary of inaction, he organised the chaotic elements, and surrounded the earth with the heavens. In addition to Pan and the Fates, his children were Uranus, Titæa, Pytho, Eris, and Erebus. This awful Power was so sacred among the Arcadians, that it was held impious to pronounce his name. The impious, however, who made less scruple about pronouncing it, are said to have found it of great virtue in magical incantations. He has been supposed to be a philosophical emblem of the principle of vegetable life. The silence of mythologists concerning him, can only be attributed to their veneration for his “dreaded name”; a proof of genuine piety which must be pleasing to our contemporary Pagans, for some such there are.

knows
My voice: the ivy or the rose,
Though torn and trampled on the plain,
May rise, unite, and bloom again,
If on his aid I call: thy heart
Alone resists and mocks my art.”—

—“Why lov'st thou me, Thessalian maid?
Why hast thou, cruel beauty, torn
Asunder two young hearts, that played
In kindred unison so blest,
As they had filled one single breast
From life's first opening morn?
Why lov'st thou me? The kings of earth
Might kneel to charms and power like thine:
But I, a youth of shepherd birth—
As well the stately mountain-pine
Might coil around the eglantine,
As thou thy radiant being twine
Round one so low, so lost as mine.”—

—“Sceptres and crowns, vain signs that move
The souls of slaves, to me are toys.
I need but love: I seek but love:
And long, amid the heartless noise
Of cities, and the woodland peace
Of vales, through all the scenes of Greece
I sought the fondest and the fairest
Of Grecian youths, my love to be:
And such a heart and form thou bearest,
And my soul sprang at once to thee,

Like an arrow to its destiny.
Yet shall my lips no spell repeat,
To bid thy heart responsive beat
To mine: thy love's spontaneous smile,
Nor forced by power, nor won by guile,
I claim: but yet a little while,
And we no more may meet.
For I must find a dreary home,
And thou, where'er thou wilt, shalt roam:
But should one tender thought awake
Of Rhododaphne, seek the cell,
Where she dissolved in tears doth dwell
Of blighted hope, and she will take
The wanderer to her breast, and make
Such flowers of bliss around him blow,
As kings would yield their thrones to know.”—

—“It must not be. The air is laden
With sweetness from thy presence born:
Music and light are round thee, maiden,
As round the Virgin Power of Morn:
I feel, I shrink beneath, thy beauty:
But love, truth, woe, remembrance, duty,
All point against thee, though arrayed
In charms whose power no heart could shun
That ne'er had loved another maid
Or any but that loveliest one,
Who now, within my bosom's void,
A sad pale shade, by thee destroyed,
Forbids all other love to bind
My soul: thine least of womankind.”—

Faltering and faint his accents broke,

As those concluding words he spoke.
No more she said, but sadly smiled,
And took his hand; and like a child
He followed her. All waste and wild,
A pathless moor before them lies.
Beyond, long chains of mountains rise:
Their summits with eternal snow
Are crowned: vast forests wave below,
And stretch, with ample slope and sweep,
Down to the moorlands and the deep.
Human dwelling see they none,
Save one cottage, only one,
Mossy, mildewed, frail, and poor,
Even as human home can be,
Where the forest skirts the moor,
By the inhospitable sea.
There, in tones of melody,
Sweet and clear as Dian's voice
When the rocks and woods rejoice
In her steps the chace impelling,
Rhododaphne, pausing, calls.
Echo answers from the walls:
Mournful response, vaguely telling
Of a long-deserted dwelling.
Twice her lips the call repeat,
Tuneful summons, thrilling sweet.
Still the same sad accents follow,
Cheerless echo, faint and hollow.
Nearer now, with curious gaze,
The youth that lonely cot surveys.
Long grass chokes the path before it,

Twining ivy mantles o'er it,
On the low roof blend together
Beds of moss and stains of weather,
Flowering weeds that trail and cluster,
Scaly lichen, stone-crop's lustre,
All confused in radiance mellow,
Red, grey, green, and golden yellow.
Idle splendor! gleaming only
Over ruins rude and lonely,
When the cold hearth-stone is shattered,
When the ember-dust is scattered,
When the grass that chokes the portal
Bends not to the tread of mortal.

The maiden dropped Anthemion's hand,
And forward, with a sudden bound,
She sprung. He saw the door expand,
And close, and all was silence round,
And loneliness: and forth again
She came not. But within this hour,
A burthen to him, and a chain,
Had been her beauty and her power:
But now, thus suddenly forsaken,
In those drear solitudes, though yet
His early love remained unshaken,
He felt within his breast awaken
A sense of something like regret.

But he pursued her not: his love,
His murdered love, such step forbade.
He turned his doubtful feet, to rove
Amid that forest's maze of shade.
Beneath the matted boughs, that made

A noonday twilight, he espied
No trace of man; and far and wide
Through fern and tangling briar he strayed,
Till toil, and thirst, and hunger weighed
His nature down, and cold and drear
Night came, and no relief was near.

But now at once his steps emerge
Upon the forest's moorland verge,
Beside the white and sounding surge.
For in one long self-circling track,
His mazy path had led him back,
To where that cottage old and lone
Had stood: but now to him unknown
Was all the scene. Mid gardens, fair
With trees and flowers of fragrance rare,
A rich and ample pile was there,
Glittering with myriad lights, that shone
Far-streaming through the dusky air.

With hunger, toil, and weariness,
Outworn, he cannot choose but pass
Tow'rds that fair pile. With gentle stress
He strikes the gate of polished brass.
Loud and long the portal rings,
As back with swift recoil it swings,
Disclosing wide a vaulted hall,
With many columns bright and tall
Encircled. Throned in order round,
Statues of dæmons and of kings
Between the marble columns frowned
With seeming life: each throne beside,
Two humbler statues stood, and raised

Each one a silver lamp, that wide
With many-mingling radiance blazed.

High-reared on one surpassing throne,
A brazen image sate alone,
A dwarfish shape, of wrinkled brow,
With sceptred hand and crowned head.
No sooner did Anthemion's tread
The echoes of the hall awake,
Than up that image rose, and spake,
As from a trumpet:—“What would'st thou?”—

Anthemion, in amaze and dread,
Replied:—“With toil and hunger worn,
I seek but food, and rest till morn.”—
The image spake again, and said:
—“Enter: fear not: thou art free
To my best hospitality.”—

Spontaneously, an inner door
Unclosed. Anthemion from the hall
Passed to a room of state, that wore
Aspect of destined festival.
Of fragrant cedar was the floor,
And round the light-pilastered wall
Curtains of crimson and of gold
Hung down in many a gorgeous fold.
Bright lamps, through that apartment gay
Adorned like Cytherëa's bowers
With vases filled with odorous flowers,
Diffused an artificial day.
A banquet's sumptuous order there,
In long array of viands rare,
Fruits, and ambrosial wine, was spread.

A golden boy, in semblance fair
Of actual life, came forth, and led
Anthemion to a couch, beside
That festal table, canopied
With cloth by subtlest Tyrian dyed,
And ministered the feast: the while,
Invisible harps symphonious wreathed
Wild webs of soul-dissolving sound,
And voices, alternating round,
Songs, as of choral maidens, breathed.

Now to the brim the boy filled up
With sparkling wine a crystal cup.
Anthemion took the cup, and quaffed,
With reckless thirst, the enchanted draught.
That instant came a voice divine,
A maiden voice:—“Now art thou mine!”—

The golden boy is gone. The song
And the symphonious harps no more
Their Siren minstrelsy prolong.
One crimson curtain waves before
His sight, and opens. From its screen,
The nymph of more than earthly mien,
The magic maid of Thessaly,
Came forth, her tresses loosely streaming,
Her eyes with dewy radiance beaming,
Her form all grace and symmetry,
In silken vesture light and free
As if the woof were air, she came,
And took his hand, and called his name.

—“Now art thou mine!”—again she cried,—
“My love's indissoluble chain

Has found thee in that goblet's tide,
And thou shalt wear my flower again.”—
She said, and in Anthemion's breast
She placed the laurel-rose: her arms
She twined around him, and imprest
Her lips on his, and fixed on him
Fond looks of passionate love: her charms
With tenfold radiance on his sense
Shone through the studied negligence
Of her light vesture. His eyes swim
With dizziness. The lamps grow dim,
And tremble, and expire. No more.
Darkness is there, and Mystery:
And Silence keeps the golden key
Of Beauty's bridal door.

University of Virginia Library

Canto VI