“Nisus, the guardian of the portal, stood, Eager to gild his arms with hostile blood; Well-skilled in fight the quivering lance to wield, Or pour his arrows thro’ the embattled field: From Ida torn, he left his Sylvan cave, And sought a foreign home, a distant grave. To watch the movements of the Daunian host, With him Euryalus sustains the post; No lovelier mien adorn’d the ranks of Troy, And beardless bloom yet graced the gallant boy; Tho’ few the seasons of his youthful life, As yet a novice in the martial strife, ’Twas his, with beauty, valour’s gifts to share— A soul heroic, as his form was fair. These burn with one pure flame of generous love; In peace, in war, united still they move; Friendship and glory form their joint reward; And now combined they hold their nightly guard.” [The two then carry out a daring raid on the enemy, in which Euryalus is slain. Nisus, coming to his rescue is—after performing prodigies of valor—slain too.] “Thus Nisus all his fond affection proved— Dying, revenged the fate of him he loved; Then on his bosom sought his wonted place, And death was heavenly in his friend’s embrace! Celestial pair! if aught my verse can claim, Wafted on Time’s broad pinion, yours is fame! Ages on ages shall your fate admire, No future day shall see your names expire, While stands the Capitol, immortal dome! And vanquished millions hail their empress, Rome!” [Sidenote: _T. Moore on Byron_] Byron’s friendships, in fact, with young men were so marked that Moore in his _Life and Letters of Lord Byron_ seems to have felt it necessary to mention and, to some extent, to explain them:— “During his stay in Greece (in 1810) we find him forming one of those extraordinary friendships—if attachment to persons so inferior to himself can be called by that name—of which I have already mentioned two or three instances in his younger days, and in which the pride of being a protector and the pleasure of exciting gratitude seem to have contributed to his mind the chief, pervading charm. The person whom he now adopted in this manner, and from similar feelings to those which had inspired his early attachments to the cottage boy near Newstead and the young chorister at Cambridge, was a Greek youth, named Nicolo Giraud, the son, I believe, of a widow lady in whose house the artist Lusieri lodged. In this young man he seems to have taken the most lively and even brotherly interest.” [Sidenote: _Shelley on Friendship_] Shelley, in his fragmentary _Essay on Friendship_—stated by his friend Hogg to have been written “not long before his death”—says:—