Better, though each man's life-blood were a river,
That it should flow, and overflow, than creep 150
Through thousand lazy channels in our veins,
Dammed like the dull canal with locks and chains,
And moving, as a sick man in his sleep,
Three paces, and then faltering:--better be
Where the extinguished Spartans still are free,
In their proud charnel of Thermopylae,
Than stagnate in our marsh,--or o'er the deep
Fly, and one current to the ocean add,
One spirit to the souls our fathers had,
One freeman more, America, to thee![247] 160

FOOTNOTES:

[234] {193}[The _Ode on Venice_ (originally _Ode_) was completed by July
10, 1818 (_Letters_, 1900, iv. 245), but was published at the same time
as _Mazeppa_ and _A Fragment_, June 28, 1819. The _motif_, a lamentation
over the decay and degradation of Venice, re-echoes the sentiments
expressed in the opening stanzas (i.-xix.) of the Fourth Canto of
_Childe Harold_. A realistic description of the "Hour of Death" (lines
37-55), and a eulogy of the United States of America (lines 133-160),
give distinction to the _Ode_.]

[235] [Compare _Childe Harold_, Canto IV. stanza xiii. lines 4-6.]

[236] [Compare _ibid._, stanza xi. lines 5-9.]

[237] {194}[Compare _Childe Harold_, Canto IV. stanza iii lines 1-4.]

[238] [Compare _The Prisoner of Chillon_, line 178, note 2, _vide ante_,
p. 21.]

[239] {195}[In contrasting Sheridan with Brougham, Byron speaks of "the
red-hot ploughshares of public life."--_Diary_, March 10, 1814,
_Letters_, 1898, ii. 397.]

[240] [Compare--

"At last it [the mob] takes to weapons such as men
Snatch when despair makes human hearts less pliant.
Then comes 'the tug of war;'--'t will come again,
I rather doubt; and I would fain say 'fie on't,'
If I had not perceived that revolution
Alone can save the earth from Hell's pollution."

_Don Juan_, Canto VIII. stanza li. lines 3-8.]

[241] {196}[Compare Lord Tennyson's stanzas--

"Of old sat Freedom on the heights."]

[242] [Compare _Childe Harold_, Canto IV. stanza xiv. line 3, note 1,
and line 6, _Poetical Works_, 1899, ii. 339, 340.]

[243] {197}[In 1814 the Italian possessions of the Emperor of Austria
were "constituted into separate and particular states, under the title
of the kingdom of Venetian Lombardy."--Koch's _Europe_, p. 234.]

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