, _sq_. See, too, Byron's letters to his mother, April 17, and to H.
Drury, May 3, 1810: _Letters_, 1898, i. 262.)]

[do] {100} _Ancient of days! august Athenae! where_.--[MS. D.]

[dp] _Gone--mingled with the waste_----.--[MS. erased.]

[114] {101} ["Stole," apart from its restricted use as an ecclesiastical
vestment, is used by Spenser and other poets as an equivalent for any
long and loosely flowing robe, but is, perhaps inaccurately, applied to
the short cloak (_tribon_), the "habit" of Socrates when he lived, and,
after his death, the distinctive dress of the cynics.]

[dq] ----_gray flits the Ghost of Power_.--[MS. D. erased.]

[dr] ----_whose altars cease to burn_.--[D.]

[ds] ----_whose Faith is built on reeds_.--[MS. D. erased.]

[115] {102} [Compare Shakespeare, _Measure for Measure_, act iii, sc. 1,
lines 5-7--

"Reason thus with life:
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep."]

[dt] _Still wilt thou harp_----.--[MS. D. erased.]

[du] _Though 'twas a God, as graver records tell_.--[MS. erased.]

[116] [The demigods Erechtheus and Theseus "appeared" at Marathon, and
fought side by side with Miltiades (Grote's _History of Greece_, iv.
284).]

[117] {103} [Compare Shakespeare, _Hamlet_, act v. sc. 1, _passim_.]

[118] [Socrates affirmed that true self-knowledge was to know that we
know nothing, and in his own case he denied any other knowledge; but
"this confession of ignorance was certainly not meant to be a sceptical
denial of all knowledge." "The idea of knowledge was to him a boundless
field, in the face of which he could not but be ignorant" (_Socrates and
the Socratic Schools_, by Dr. E. Zeller, London, 1868, p. 102).]

[119] [Stanzas viii. and ix. are not in the MS.

The expunged lines (see _var._ i.) carried the Lucretian tenets of the
preceding stanza to their logical conclusion. The end is silence, not a
reunion with superior souls. But Dallas objected; and it may well be
that, in the presence of death, Byron could not "guard his unbelief," or
refrain from a renewed questioning of the "Grand Perhaps." Stanza for
stanza, the new version is an improvement on the original. (See
_Recollections of the Life of Lord Byron_, 1824, p. 169. See, too,
letters to Hodgson, September 3 and September 13, 1811: _Letters_, 1898,
ii. 18, 34.)]

[dv]

_Frown not upon me, churlish Priest! that I_
_Look not for Life, where life may never be