p
By holy maid on Delphi's haunted steep,
'Mid the dim twilight of the laurel grove,
Too fair to worship, too divine to love.
Yet on that form in wild delirious trance
With more than rev'rence gazed the Maid of France,
Day after day the love-sick dreamer stood
With him alone, nor thought it solitude!
To cherish grief, her last, her dearest care,
Her one fond hope--to perish of despair."
Milman's _Poetical Works_, Paris, 1829, p. 180.

Compare, too, Coleridge's _Kubla Khan_, lines 14-16--

"A savage place, as holy and enchanted,
As e'er beneath a wailing moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover."
_Poetical Works_, 1893, p. 94.]

[px] {448} _Before its eyes unveiled to image forth a God!_--[MS. M.
erased.]

[530] [The fire which Prometheus stole from heaven was the living soul,
"the source of all our woe." (Compare Horace, _Odes_, i. 3. 29-31--

"Post ignem aetheria domo
Subductum, Macies et nova Febrium
Terris incubuit cohors.")]

[py] {449} _The phantom fades away into the general mass_.--[MS. M.
erased.]

[531] {450} [Compare _Hamlet_, act iii. sc. 1, line 76--"Who would these
fardels bear?"]

[532] [Charlotte Augusta (b. January 7, 1796), only daughter of the
Prince Regent, was married to Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, May 2, 1816, and
died in childbirth, November 6, 1817.

Other poets produced their dirges; but it was left to Byron to deal
finely, and as a poet should, with a present grief, which was felt to be
a national calamity.

Southey's "Funeral Song for the Princess Charlotte of Wales" was only
surpassed in feebleness by Coleridge's "Israel's Lament." Campbell
composed a laboured elegy, which was "spoken by Mr ... at Drury Lane
Theatre, on the First Opening of the House after the Death of the
Princess Charlotte, 1817;" and Montgomery wrote a hymn on "The Royal
Infant, Still-born, November 5, 1817."

Not a line of these lamentable effusions has survived; but the poor,
pitiful story of common misfortune, with its tragic irony, uncommon
circumstance, and far-reaching consequence, found its _vates sacer_ in
the author of _Childe Harold_.]

[pz] {451}
_Her prayers for thee and in thy coming power_
_Beheld her Iris--Thou too lonely Lord_
_And desolate Consort! fatal is thy dower_,
_The Husband of a year--the Father of an_----[? _hour_].--