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(From Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage)
ABOVE me are the Alps, | |
| The palaces of nature, whose vast walls | |
| Have pinnacled in clouds their snowy scalps, | |
| And throned eternity in icy halls | |
| Of cold sublimity, where forms and falls | 5 |
| The avalanche,—the thunderbolt of snow! | |
| All that expands the spirit, yet appalls, | |
| Gathers around these summits, as to show | |
| How earth may pierce to heaven, yet leave vain man below. | |
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| But ere these matchless heights I dare to scan, | 10 |
| There is a spot should not be passed in vain,— | |
| Morat! the proud, the patriot field! where man | |
| May gaze on ghastly trophies of the slain, | |
| Nor blush for those who conquered on that plain; | |
| Here Burgundy bequeathed his tombless host, | 15 |
| A bony heap, through ages to remain, | |
| Themselves their monument;—the Stygian coast | |
| Unsepulchred they roamed, and shrieked each wandering ghost. | |
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| While Waterloo with Cannæ’s carnage vies, | |
| Morat and Marathon twin names shall stand; | 20 |
| They were true glory’s stainless victories, | |
| Won by the unambitious heart and hand | |
| Of a proud, brotherly, and civic band, | |
| All unbought champions in no princely cause | |
| Of vice-entailed corruption; they no land | 25 |
| Doomed to bewail the blasphemy of laws | |
| Making kings’ rights divine, by some Draconic clause. | |
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