“Though the ocean roar around me,
          Yet it still shall bear me on;
        Though a desert should surround me,
          It hath springs that may be won.

        “Were’t the last drop in the well,
          As I gasp’d upon the brink,
        Ere my fainting spirit fell,
          ’Tis to thee that I would drink.

        “With that water, as this wine,
          The libation I would pour,
        Should be—­peace with thine and mine,
          And a health to thee, Tom Moore.

“This should have been written fifteen moons ago—­the first stanza was.  I am just come out from an hour’s swim in the Adriatic; and I write to you with a black-eyed Venetian girl before me, reading Boccacio.

“Last week I had a row on the road (I came up to Venice from my casino, a few miles on the Paduan road, this blessed day, to bathe) with a fellow in a carriage, who was impudent to my horse.  I gave him a swingeing box on the ear, which sent him to the police, who dismissed his complaint.  Witnesses had seen the transaction.  He first shouted, in an unseemly way, to frighten my palfry.  I wheeled round, rode up to the window, and asked him what he meant.  He grinned, and said some foolery, which produced him an immediate slap in the face, to his utter discomfiture.  Much blasphemy ensued, and some menace, which I stopped by dismounting and opening the carriage door, and intimating an intention of mending the road with his immediate remains, if he did not hold his tongue.  He held it.

     “Monk Lewis is here—­’how pleasant!’[5] He is a very good fellow,
     and very much yours.  So is Sam—­so is every body—­and amongst the
     number,

     “Yours ever,

     “B.

     “P.S.  What think you of Manfred?”

[Footnote 5:  An allusion (such as often occurs in these letters) to an anecdote with which he had been amused.]

* * * * *

LETTER 290.  TO MR. MURRAY.

     “La Mira, near Venice, July 15. 1817.

“I have finished (that is, written—­the file comes afterwards) ninety and eight stanzas of the fourth Canto, which I mean to be the concluding one.  It will probably be about the same length as the third, being already of the dimensions of the first or second Cantos.  I look upon parts of it as very good, that is, if the three former are good, but this we shall see; and at any rate, good or not, it is rather a different style from the last—­less metaphysical—­which, at any rate, will be a variety.  I sent you the shaft of the column as a specimen the other day, i.e. the first stanza.  So you may be thinking of its arrival towards autumn, whose winds will not be the only ones to be raised, if so be as how that it is ready by that time.