d. The "more than friend" had "ceased to be" before
the "wanderer" returned. It is evident that Byron did not take Dallas
into his confidence.]

FOOTNOTES:

[113] {99} [Stanzas i.-xv. form a kind of dramatic prologue to the
Second Canto of the Pilgrimage. The general meaning is clear enough, but
the unities are disregarded. The scene shifts more than once, and there
is a moral within a moral. The poet begins by invoking Athena (Byron
wrote Athenae) to look down on the ruins of "her holy and beautiful
house," and bewails her unreturning heroes of the sword and pen. He then
summons an Oriental, a "Son of the Morning," Moslem or "light Greek,"
possibly a _Canis venaticus_, the discoverer or vendor of a sepulchral
urn, and, with an adjuration to spare the sacred relic, points to the
Acropolis, the cemetery of dead divinities, and then once more to the
urn at his feet. "'Vanity of vanities--all is vanity!' Gods and men may
come and go, but Death 'goes on for ever.'" The scene changes, and he
feigns to be present at the rifling of a barrow, the "tomb of the
Athenian heroes" on the plain of Marathon, or one of the lonely tumuli
on Sigeum and Rhoeteum, "the great and goodly tombs" of Achilles and
Patroclus ("they twain in one golden urn"); of Antilochus, and of
Telamonian Ajax. Marathon he had already visited, and marked "the
perpendicular cut" which at Fauvel's instigation had been recently
driven into the large barrow; and he had, perhaps, read of the real or
pretended excavation by Signor Ghormezano (1787) of a tumulus at the
Sigean promontory. The "mind's eye," which had conjured up "the
shattered heaps," images a skull of one who "kept the world in awe,"
and, after moralizing in Hamlet's vein on the humorous catastrophe of
decay, the poet concludes with the Preacher "that there is no work, nor
device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave." After this profession
of unfaith, before he returns to Harold and his pilgrimage, he takes up
his parable and curses Elgin and all his works. The passage as a whole
suggests the essential difference between painting and poetry. As a
composition, it recalls the frontispiece of a seventeenth-century
classic. The pictured scene, with its superfluity of accessories, is
grotesque enough; but the poetic scenery, inconsequent and yet vivid as
a dream, awakens, and fulfills the imagination. (_Travels in Albania_,
by Lord Broughton, 1858, i. 380; ii. 128, 129, 138; _The Odyssey_, xxiv.
74