_Man_. Why would this fool break in on me, and force 50 My art to pranks fantastical?--no matter, It was not of my seeking. My heart sickens, And weighs a fixed foreboding on my soul. But it is calm--calm as a sullen sea After the hurricane; the winds are still, But the cold waves swell high and heavily, And there is danger in them. Such a rest Is no repose. My life hath been a combat, And every thought a wound, till I am scarred In the immortal part of me.--What now?] 60 [*] "Raven-stone (Rabenstein), a translation of the German word for the gibbet, which in Germany and Switzerland is permanent, and made of stone." [Compare _Werner,_ act ii. sc. 2. Compare, too, Anster's _Faust,_ 1883, p. 306.] [§] _A prodigal son--and a pregnant nun, nun,_ _And a widow re-wedded within the year--_ _And a calf at grass--and a priest at mass._ _Are things which every day appear_.--[MS. erased.] [155] {122}[A supplementary MS. supplies the text for the remainder of the scene.] [156] {124}[For the death of Nero, "Rome's sixth Emperor," _vide_ _C. Suet. Tranq_., lib. vi. cap. xlix.] [bd] / _not loss of life, but_ \ _To shun_ < > _public death_--[MS. M.] \ _the torments of a_ / [157] [A reminiscence of the clouds of spray from the Fall of the Staubbach, which, in certain aspects, appear to be springing upwards from the bed of the waterfall.] [158] {125}[Compare _The Giaour,_ lines 282-284. Compare, too, _Don Juan,_ Canto IV. stanza lvii. line 8.] [159] [Here, as in so many other passages of _Manfred,_ Byron is recording his own feelings and forebodings. The same note is struck in the melancholy letters of the autumn of 1811. See, for example, the letter to Dallas, October 11, "It seems as though I were to experience in my youth the greatest misery of age," etc. (_Letters,_ 1898, ii. 52).] [160] {126}["Pray, was Manfred's speech to _the Sun_ still retained in Act third? I hope so: it was one of the best in the thing, and better than the Colosseum."--Letter to Murray, July 9, 1817, _Letters_, 1900, iv. 147. Compare Byron's early rendering of "Ossian's Address to the Sun 'in Carthon.'"--_Poetical Works_, 1898, i. 229.] [161] {127} "And it came to pass, that the _Sons of God_ saw the daughters of men, that they were fair," etc.--"There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the _Sons of God_ came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown."--_Genesis_, ch. vi. verses 2 and 4. [162] [For the "Chaldeans" and "mountain-tops," see _Childe Harold_, Canto III, stanza xiv. line i, and stanza xci. lines 1-3.] [be] {129}_Some strange things in these far years_.--[MS. M.] [163] [The Grosse Eiger is a few miles to the south of the Castle of Unspunnen.]