LXXXIV.

   When riseth Lacedaemon’s hardihood,
   When Thebes Epaminondas rears again,
   When Athens’ children are with hearts endued,
   When Grecian mothers shall give birth to men,
   Then mayst thou be restored; but not till then. 
   A thousand years scarce serve to form a state;
   An hour may lay it in the dust:  and when
   Can man its shattered splendour renovate,
Recall its virtues back, and vanquish Time and Fate?

LXXXV.

   And yet how lovely in thine age of woe,
   Land of lost gods and godlike men, art thou! 
   Thy vales of evergreen, thy hills of snow,
   Proclaim thee Nature’s varied favourite now;
   Thy fanes, thy temples to the surface bow,
   Commingling slowly with heroic earth,
   Broke by the share of every rustic plough: 
   So perish monuments of mortal birth,
So perish all in turn, save well-recorded worth;

LXXXVI.

   Save where some solitary column mourns
   Above its prostrate brethren of the cave;
   Save where Tritonia’s airy shrine adorns
   Colonna’s cliff, and gleams along the wave;
   Save o’er some warrior’s half-forgotten grave,
   Where the grey stones and unmolested grass
   Ages, but not oblivion, feebly brave,
   While strangers only not regardless pass,
Lingering like me, perchance, to gaze, and sigh ‘Alas!’

LXXXVII.

   Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild: 
   Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy fields,
   Thine olives ripe as when Minerva smiled,
   And still his honeyed wealth Hymettus yields;
   There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds,
   The freeborn wanderer of thy mountain air;
   Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds,
   Still in his beam Mendeli’s marbles glare;
Art, Glory, Freedom fail, but Nature still is fair.

LXXXVIII.

   Where’er we tread, ’tis haunted, holy ground;
   No earth of thine is lost in vulgar mould,
   But one vast realm of wonder spreads around,
   And all the Muse’s tales seem truly told,
   Till the sense aches with gazing to behold
   The scenes our earliest dreams have dwelt upon: 
   Each hill and dale, each deepening glen and wold,
   Defies the power which crushed thy temples gone: 
Age shakes Athena’s tower, but spares gray Marathon.

LXXXIX.

   The sun, the soil, but not the slave, the same;
   Unchanged in all except its foreign lord —
   Preserves alike its bounds and boundless fame;
   The battle-field, where Persia’s victim horde
   First bowed beneath the brunt of Hellas’ sword,
   As on the morn to distant Glory dear,
   When Marathon became a magic word;
   Which uttered, to the hearer’s eye appear
The camp, the host, the fight, the conqueror’s career.