?
And thou who never yet of human wrong
Left the unbalanced scale, great Nemesis,
Here where the ancients paid their worship long,
Thou who didst call the Furies from the abyss,
And round Orestes bid them howl and hiss
_For that unnatural retribution,--just
Had it but come from hands less near_,--in this
Thy former realm I call thee from the dust.
Dost thou not hear, my heart? awake thou shalt and must!
It is not that I may not have incurred
For my ancestral faults and mine, the wound
Wherewith I bleed withal, and had it been conferred
With a just weapon it had flowed unbound,
But now my blood shall not sink in the ground.

* * * *

'But in this page a record will I seek;
Not in the air shall these my words disperse,
Though I be ashes,--a far hour shall wreak
The deep prophetic fulness of this verse,
And pile on human heads the mountain of my curse.
That curse shall be forgiveness. Have I not,--
Hear me, my Mother Earth! behold it, Heaven,--
Have I not had to wrestle with my lot?
Have I not suffered things to be forgiven?
Have I not had my brain seared, my heart riven,
Hopes sapped, name blighted, life's life lied away,
And only not to desperation driven,
Because not altogether of such clay
As rots into the soul of those whom I survey?

----------

'From mighty wrongs to petty perfidy,
Have I not seen what human things could do,--
From the loud roar of foaming calumny,
To the small whispers of the paltry few,
And subtler venom of the reptile crew,
_The Janus glance of whose significant eye,
Learning to lie with silence, would seem true,
And without utterance, save the shrug or sigh,
Deal round to happy fools its speechless obloquy_?' {31}

The reader will please notice that the lines in italics are almost, word
for word, a repetition of the lines in italics in the former poem on his
wife, where he speaks of a _significant eye_ that has _learned to lie in
silence_, and were evidently meant to apply to Lady Byron and her small
circle of confidential friends.

Before this, in the Third Canto of 'Childe Harold,' he had claimed the
sympathy of the world, as a loving father, deprived by a severe fate of
the solace and society of his only child:--

'My daughter,--with this name my song began,--
My daughter,--with this name my song shall end,--
I see thee n