The Works of Lord Byron Volume II Part 78

[Hadrian's mole or mausoleum, now the Castle of St. Angelo, is situated on the banks of the Tiber, on the site of the "Horti Neronis." "It is composed of a square bas.e.m.e.nt, each side of which measures 247 feet....

A grand circular mole, nearly 1000 feet in circ.u.mference, stands on the square bas.e.m.e.nt," and, originally, "supported in its turn a cone of earth covered with evergreens, like the mausoleum of Augustus." A spiral way led to a central chamber in the interior of the mole, which contained, presumably, the porphyry sarcophagus in which Antoninus Pius deposited the ashes of Hadrian, and the tomb of the Antonines. Honorius (A.D. 428) was probably the first to convert the mausoleum into a fortress. The bronze statue of the Destroying Angel, which is placed on the summit, dates from 1740, and is the successor to five earlier statues, of which the first was erected in 1453. The conception and execution of the Moles Hadriana are entirely Roman, and, except in size and solidity, it is in no sense a mimic pyramid.--_Ruins and Excavations, etc._, by R. Lanciani, 1897, p. 554, _sq._]

[pi] {440} _The now spectator with a sanctioned mirth_ _To view the vast design_----.--[MS. M.]

[519] This and the next six stanzas have a reference to the Church of St. Peter's. (For a measurement of the comparative length of this basilica and the other great churches of Europe, see the pavement of St.

Peter's, and the _Cla.s.sical Tour through Italy_, ii. 125, _et seq._, chap, iv.)

[pj] _Look to the dome_----.--[MS. M.]

[520] [Compare _The Prophecy of Dante_, iv. 49-53--

"While still stands The austere Pantheon, into heaven shall soar A dome, its image, while the base expands Into a fane surpa.s.sing all before, Such as all flesh shall flock to kneel in--"

Compare, too, Browning's _Christmas Eve_, sect, x.--

"Is it really on the earth, This miraculous dome of G.o.d?

Has the angel's measuring-rod Which numbered cubits, gem from gem, 'Twixt the gates of the new Jerusalem, Meted it out,--and what he meted, Have the sons of men completed?

--Binding ever as he bade, Columns in the colonnade, With arms wide open to embrace The entry of the human race?"]

[pk] {441} _Lo Christ's great dome_----.--[MS.M.]

[521] [The ruins which Byron and Hobhouse explored, March 25, 1810 (_Travels in Albania_, ii. 68-71), were not the ruins of the second Temple of Artemis, the sixth wonder of the world (_vide_ Philo Byzantius, _De Septem Orbis Miraculis_), but, probably, those of "the great gymnasium near the port of the city." In 1810, and for long afterwards, the remains of the temple were buried under twenty feet of earth, and it was not till 1870 that the late Mr. J. T. Wood, the agent of the Trustees of the British Museum, had so far completed his excavations as to discover the foundations of the building on the exact spot which had been pointed out by Guhl in 1843. Fragments of the famous sculptured columns, thirty-six in number, says Pliny (_Hist. Nat._, x.x.xvi. 95), were also brought to light, and are now in the British Museum. (See _Modern Discoveries on the Site of Ancient Ephesus_, by J.

T. Wood, 1890; _Hist. of Greek Sculpture_, by A. S. Murray, ii. 304.)]

[522] [Compare _Don Juan_, Canto IX. stanza xxvii. line 2--"I have heard them in the Ephesian ruins howl."]

[pl] {442} ----_round roofs swell_.--[MS. M., D.]

[pm] _Their glittering breastplate in the sun_----.--[MS. M. erased.]

[523] [Compare Canto II. stanza lxxix. lines 2, 3--

"Oh Stamboul! once the Empress of their reign, Though turbans now pollute Sophia's shrine."]

[524] [The emphasis is on the word "fit." The measure of "fitness" is the entirety of the enshrinement or embodiment of the mortal aspiration to put on immortality. The vastness and the sacredness of St. Peter's make for and effect this embodiment. So, too, the living temple "so defined," great with the greatness of holiness, may become the enshrinement and the embodiment of the Spirit of G.o.d.]

[pn] {443} _His earthly palace_----.--[MS. M. erased.]

[525] [This stanza may be paraphrased, but not construed. Apparently, the meaning is that as the eye becomes accustomed to the details and proportions of the building, the sense of its vastness increases. Your first impression was at fault, you had not begun to realize the almost inconceivable vastness of the structure. You had begun to climb the mountain, and the dazzling peak seemed to be close at your head, but as you ascend, it recedes. "Thou movest," but the building expands; "thou climbest," but the Alp increases in height. In both cases the eye has been deceived by gigantic elegance, by the proportion of parts to the whole.]

[po] And fair proportions which beguile the eyes.--[MS. M. erased.]

[pp]

_Painting and marble of so many dyes_-- _And glorious high altar where for ever burn_.--[MS. M. erased.]

[pq]

_Its Giant's limbs and by degrees_---- or, _The Giant eloquence and thus unroll_.--[MS. M. erased.]

[pr]

----_our narrow sense_ _Cannot keep pace with mind_----[MS. M. erased.]

[ps] {445} _What Earth nor Time--nor former Thought could frame_.--[MS.

M. erased.]

[pt] _Before your eye--and ye return not as ye came_.--[MS. M. erased.]

[pu] _In that which Genius did, what great Conceptions can_.--[MS. M.

erased.]

[526] [Pliny tells us (_Hist. Nat._, x.x.xvi. 5) that the Laoc.o.o.n which stood in the palace of t.i.tus was the work of three sculptors, natives of Rhodes; and it is now universally admitted that the statue which was found (January 14, 1516) in the vineyard of Felice de' Freddi, not far from the ruins of the palace, and is now in the Vatican, is the statue which Pliny describes. M. Collignon, in his _Histoire de la Sculpture Grecque_, gives reasons for a.s.signing the date of the Laoc.o.o.n to the first years of the first century B.C. It follows that the work is a century later than the frieze of the great altar of Pergamos, which contains the figure of a young giant caught in the toils of Athena's serpent--a theme which served as a model for later sculptors of the same school. In 1817 the Laoc.o.o.n was in the heyday of its fame, and was regarded as the supreme achievement of ancient art. Since then it has been decried and dethroned. M. Collignon protests against this excessive depreciation, and makes himself the mouthpiece of a second and more temperate reaction: "On peut ... gouter mediocrement le melodrame, sans meconnaitre pour cela les reelles qualites du groupe. La composition est d'une structure irreprochable, d'une harmonie de lignes qui defie toute critique. Le torse du Laoc.o.o.n trahit une science du nu pen commune"

(_Hist. de la Sculp. Grecque_, 1897, ii. 550, 551).]

[pv] {446} ----_the writhing boys_.--[MS. M. erased.]

[pw] _Shackles its living rings, and_----.--[MS. M. erased.]

[527] [In his description of the Apollo Belvidere, Byron follows the traditional theory of Montorsoli, the pupil of Michael Angelo, who restored the left hand and right forearm of the statue. The G.o.d, after his struggle with the python, stands forth proud and disdainful, the left hand holding a bow, and the right hand falling as of one who had just shot an arrow. The discovery, in 1860, of a bronze statuette in the Stroganoff Collection at St. Petersburg, which holds something like an aegis and a mantle in the left hand, suggested to Stephani a second theory, that the Belvidere Apollo was a copy of a statue of Apollo Boedromios, an _ex-voto_ offering on the rout of the Gauls when they attacked Delphi (B.C. 278). To this theory Furtwaengler at one time a.s.sented, but subsequently came to the conclusion that the Stroganoff bronze was a forgery. His present contention is that the left hand held a bow, as Montorsoli imagined, whilst the right grasped "a branch of laurel, of which the leaves are still visible on the trunk which the copyist added to the bronze original." The Apollo Belvidere is, he concludes, a copy of the Apollo Alexicacos of Leochares (fourth century B.C.), which stood in the Cerameicos at Athens. M. Maxime Collignon, who utters a word of warning as to the undue depreciation of the statue by modern critics, adopts Furtwaengler's later theory (_Masterpieces of Ancient Greek Sculpture_, by A. Furtwaengler, 1895, ii. 405, _sq._).]

[528] {447} [The "delicate" beauty of the statue recalled the features of a lady whom he had once thought of making his wife. "The Apollo Belvidere," he wrote to Moore (May 12, 1817), "is the image of Lady Adelaide Forbes. I think I never saw such a likeness."]

[529] [It is probable that lines 1-4 of this stanza contain an allusion to a fact related by M. Pinel, in his work, _Sur l'Insanite_, which Milman turned to account in his _Belvidere Apollo_, a Newdigate Prize Poem of 1812--

"Beauteous as vision seen in dreamy sleep By holy maid on Delphi's haunted steep, 'Mid the dim twilight of the laurel grove, Too fair to wors.h.i.+p, 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 G.o.d!_--[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 ma.s.s_.--[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 surpa.s.sed 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."