VOICE WITHOUT: 
Victory!  Victory!

MAHMUD: 
Weak lightning before darkness! poor faint smile 915
Of dying Islam!  Voice which art the response
Of hollow weakness!  Do I wake and live? 
Were there such things, or may the unquiet brain,
Vexed by the wise mad talk of the old Jew,
Have shaped itself these shadows of its fear? 920
It matters not!—­for nought we see or dream,
Possess, or lose, or grasp at, can be worth
More than it gives or teaches.  Come what may,
The Future must become the Past, and I
As they were to whom once this present hour, 925
This gloomy crag of time to which I cling,
Seemed an Elysian isle of peace and joy
Never to be attained.—­I must rebuke
This drunkenness of triumph ere it die,
And dying, bring despair.  Victory! poor slaves! 930

[EXIT MAHMUD.]

VOICE WITHOUT: 
Shout in the jubilee of death!  The Greeks
Are as a brood of lions in the net
Round which the kingly hunters of the earth
Stand smiling.  Anarchs, ye whose daily food
Are curses, groans, and gold, the fruit of death, 935
From Thule to the girdle of the world,
Come, feast! the board groans with the flesh of men;
The cup is foaming with a nation’s blood,
Famine and Thirst await! eat, drink, and die!

SEMICHORUS 1: 
Victorious Wrong, with vulture scream, 940
Salutes the rising sun, pursues the flying day! 
I saw her, ghastly as a tyrant’s dream,
Perch on the trembling pyramid of night,
Beneath which earth and all her realms pavilioned lay
In visions of the dawning undelight. 945
Who shall impede her flight? 
Who rob her of her prey?

VOICE WITHOUT: 
Victory!  Victory!  Russia’s famished eagles
Dare not to prey beneath the crescent’s light. 
Impale the remnant of the Greeks! despoil! 950
Violate! make their flesh cheaper than dust!

SEMICHORUS 2: 
Thou voice which art
The herald of the ill in splendour hid! 
Thou echo of the hollow heart
Of monarchy, bear me to thine abode 955
When desolation flashes o’er a world destroyed: 
Oh, bear me to those isles of jagged cloud
Which float like mountains on the earthquake, mid
The momentary oceans of the lightning,
Or to some toppling promontory proud 960
Of solid tempest whose black pyramid,
Riven, overhangs the founts intensely bright’ning
Of those dawn-tinted deluges of fire
Before their waves expire,
When heaven and earth are light, and only light 965
In the thunder-night!

NOTE: 
958 earthquake edition 1822; earthquakes editions 1839.