No matter; we should ne’er too much enquire, But facts are facts: no knight could be more true, And firmer faith no ladye—love desire; We will omit the proofs, save one or two: ’Tis said no one in hand ‘can hold a fire By thought of frosty Caucasus;’ but few, I really think; yet Juan’s then ordeal Was more triumphant, and not much less real. Here I might enter on a chaste description, Having withstood temptation in my youth, But hear that several people take exception At the first two books having too much truth; Therefore I’ll make Don Juan leave the ship soon, Because the publisher declares, in sooth, Through needles’ eyes it easier for the camel is To pass, than those two cantos into families. ’Tis all the same to me; I’m fond of yielding, And therefore leave them to the purer page Of Smollett, Prior, Ariosto, Fielding, Who say strange things for so correct an age; I once had great alacrity in wielding My pen, and liked poetic war to wage, And recollect the time when all this cant Would have provoked remarks which now it shan’t. As boys love rows, my boyhood liked a squabble; But at this hour I wish to part in peace, Leaving such to the literary rabble: Whether my verse’s fame be doom’d to cease While the right hand which wrote it still is able, Or of some centuries to take a lease, The grass upon my grave will grow as long, And sigh to midnight winds, but not to song. Of poets who come down to us through distance Of time and tongues, the foster-babes of Fame, Life seems the smallest portion of existence; Where twenty ages gather o’er a name, ’Tis as a snowball which derives assistance From every flake, and yet rolls on the same, Even till an iceberg it may chance to grow; But, after all, ’tis nothing but cold snow. And so great names are nothing more than nominal, And love of glory ’s but an airy lust, Too often in its fury overcoming all Who would as ’twere identify their dust From out the wide destruction, which, entombing all, Leaves nothing till ‘the coming of the just’— Save change: I’ve stood upon Achilles’ tomb, And heard Troy doubted; time will doubt of Rome. The very generations of the dead Are swept away, and tomb inherits tomb, Until the memory of an age is fled, And, buried, sinks beneath its offspring’s doom: Where are the epitaphs our fathers read? Save a few glean’d from the sepulchral gloom Which once-named myriads nameless lie beneath, And lose their own in universal death. I canter by the spot each afternoon Where perish’d in his fame the hero-boy, Who lived too long for men, but died too soon For human vanity, the young De Foix! A broken pillar, not uncouthly hewn, But which neglect is hastening to destroy, Records Ravenna’s carnage on its face, While weeds and ordure rankle round the base.