sanctuary. I twine
My hopes of being remember'd in my line,
With my land's language; if too fond and far
These aspirations in their hope incline--
If my fame should be as my fortunes are,
Of hasty growth and blight, and dull oblivion bar

My name from out the temple where the dead
Are honour'd by the nations--let it be,
And light the laurels on a loftier head,
And be the Spartan's epitaph on me:
"Sparta had many a worthier son than he";
Meantime I seek no sympathies, nor need;
The thorns which I have reap'd are of the tree
I planted--they have torn me--and I bleed:
I should have known what fruit would spring from such a seed.

It will strike the reader as remarkable, that although the poet, in
the course of this canto, takes occasion to allude to Dante and
Tasso, in whose destinies there was a shadowy likeness of his own,
the rumination is mingled with less of himself than might have been
expected, especially when it is considered how much it was a habit
with him, to make his own feelings the basis and substratum of the
sentiments he ascribed to others. It has also more than once
surprised me that he has so seldom alluded to Alfieri, whom of all
poets, both in character and conduct, he most resembled; with this
difference, however, that Alfieri was possessed of affections equally
intense and durable, whereas the caprice of Byron made him uncertain
in his partialities, or what was the same in effect, made his friends
set less value on them than perhaps they were entitled to.

Before Childe Harold was finished, an incident occurred which
suggested to Byron a poem of a very different kind to any he had yet
attempted:--without vouching for the exact truth of the anecdote, I
have been told, that he one day received by the mail a copy of
Whistlecraft's prospectus and specimen of an intended national work;
and, moved by its playfulness, immediately after reading it, began
Beppo, which he finished at a sitting. The facility with which he
composed renders the story not improbable; but, singular as it may
seem, the poem itself has the facetious flavour in it of his gaiety,
stronger than even his grave works have of his frowardness, commonly
believed to have been--I think, unjustly--the predominant mood of his
character.

The Ode to Venice is also to be numbered among his compositions in
that city; a spirited and indignant effusion, full of his peculiar
lurid fire, and rich in a v