224 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



[No. 100. 



I see, that can be assigned to the lines as they 

 stand. 



If the punctuation be altered, that is, if the 

 semicolon after " since " be removed, and a comma 

 placed at the end of tlie line, the whole becomes 

 luminous : 



" Thy waters wasted them while they were free, 

 And many a tyrant since their shores obey." 



That is (I beg pardon if I am unnecessarily ex- 

 planatory), " The waters wasted these empires 

 while they were free, and since they have been 

 enslaved," — an apt illustration of that indifference 

 to human affiiirs which the poet is attributing to 

 the ocean. The words, " the stranger, slave, or 

 savage," which follow in the next line, are to be 

 taken in connexion with the phrase " many a 

 tyrant," and as an enumeration of the different 

 sorts of tyrants to which these unhappy empires 

 have been subjected. 



This is my view of the sense of this famous 

 passage : if any of your correspondents can point 

 out a better, I can only say " candidus imperti," 

 &c. 



There was a very elaborate article on Lord 

 Byron's Address to the Ocean in Blackwood' s 

 Magazine for October, 1848 ; but the writer, who 

 dissects it almost line by line, has somehow, as is 

 the wont of commentators, happened to pass over 

 the difficulty which stands riglit in his way. To 

 make up for tliis, however, he contrives to find 

 new difficulties of his own. Tlie following is a 

 specimen : 



" Recite," he says, "the stanza beginning, 

 ' Tliy shores are empires, changed in all save thee;' 

 and when the sonorous roll has subsided, try to under- 

 stand it. You will find some difficulty, if we mistake 

 not, in knowing who or wliat is the apostropliized sub- 

 ject. Unquestion:ibly the world's ocean, and not the 

 Mediterranean. The very last verse we were far in 

 the Atlantic : 



' Thy shores are empires.' 

 The shores of the world's ocean are empires. There are, 

 or have been, the British empire, the German empire, 

 the Russian empire, and the empire of the Great 

 Mogul, the Chinese empire, the empire of Morocco, 

 the four great empires of antiquity, the French empire, 

 and some others. The poet does not intend names and 

 things in this very strict way, however," &c. 



What einpires the poet did mean there is surely 

 no difficulty in discovering, for those who wish to 

 understand rather than to cavil. The very next 

 line to that quoted is — 



" Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they ? " 

 and it would require some hardihood to assert 

 that these empires were not on the shores of the 

 Mediterranean. 



After all, the best commentators are translators ; 

 they are obliged to ta-ke the difficulties by the 

 horns. I find, in ^ translation of Byron's Woi'ks 



published at Pforzheim in 1842, the lines thus 



rendered by Dr. Duttenhofer : 



" Du bleibst, ob Reiche schwinden an den K listen, — 

 Assyrien, Hellas, Rom, Carthago — schwand, 

 "D'ls freien kbnnte Wasserfluth verwiisten 

 Wie die Tyrannen ; es gehorcbt der Strand 

 Dem Fremdling, Sclaven, Wilden," &c. 



Duttenhofer has here taken the text as he found 

 it, and has given it as much meaning as he could; 

 but alas for those who are compelled to take their 

 notion of the poetry of Childe Harold from his 

 German, instead of the original English ! There 

 is one passage in which the reader finds this re- 

 flection driven hard upon him. Who is there that 

 does not know Byron's stanza on the Dying Gla- 

 diator, when, speaking of 

 " The inhuman shout which hail'd the wretch who 



won," 

 he adds, in lines which will be read till Homer and 

 Virgil are forgotten : 



" He heard it, but he heeded not — his eyes 

 Were with his heart, and that was far away ; 

 He reck'd not of the life he lost nor prize. 

 But where liis rude hut by the Danube lay, 

 There were his young barbarians all at play, 

 There was their Dacian mother — he, their sire, 

 Butcher'd to make a Roman holiday — 

 All this giish'd with bis blood — shall he expire 

 And unavenged? Arise, ye Gotlis! andglut your ire I" 



There are two phrases in this stanza which seem 

 to me to have never been surpassed : " young 

 barbarians," and " all this gushed ivith his blood." 

 How inimitable is "young barbarians!" The 

 " curiosa felicitas"of Horace never carried him 

 farther, — or perhaps so far. Herr Duttenhofer 

 contents himself by saying — 



" fern am Donaustrand 

 Sind seine Kinder, freuend sich am Spiel." 



" Afar on the shore of the Danube are his 

 children, diverting themselves at play." Good 

 heavens ! is this translation, and German transla- 

 tion too, of which we have heard so much ? Again: 

 " wie sein Blut 

 Hinfliesst, denkt er an dies." 



"As his blood flows away, he thinks of this!" 

 What could Herr Duttenhofer be thinking of? 



To my surprise, on turning to the passage this 

 moment in Byron's poems, I find it stands — 



" All this rush'd with his blood," 

 instead of ^'■gnsli'd." It is so in the original edition, 

 in the Works, and iir the splendid eilition of 1841, 

 all three. Can there be any doubt of the supe- 

 riority of " giish'd ? " To me there seems none ; 

 ^nd, singularly enough, it so happens that twice in 

 conversation with two of the most distinguished 

 writers of this age — one a prosaist and the other 

 a poet, whose names I wish I were at liberty to 

 mention — I have had occasion to quote this pas- 

 sage, and they both agreed with me in ascribing 



