On this Day I Complete my Thirty-Sixth Year

High thoughts, high resolves; but the brain that was overtasked, and the frame that was outworn, would be tasked and worn little longer.

Continuing Lord Byron and the Greek War of Independence,
our selection from Lord Byron by John Nichol published in 1899. The selection is presented in 4.5 easy 5-minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in Lord Byron and the Greek War of Independence.

Time: 1824
Place: Greece

The disputant allies in the common cause occupied each a flat of the same small house; the soldier by profession was bent on writing the Turks down, the poet on fighting them down, holding that “the work of the sword must precede that of the pen, and that camps must be the training-schools of freedom.” Their altercations were sometimes fierce. “Despot!” cried Stanhope, “after professing liberal principles from boyhood, you, when called to act, prove yourself a Turk.” “Radical!” retorted Bryon, “if I had held up my finger, I could have crushed your press” — but this did not prevent the recognition by each of them of the excellent qualities of the other.

Ultimately Stanhope went to Athens and allied himself with Trelawney and Odysseus and the party of the Left. Nothing can be more statesmanlike than some of Byron’s papers of this and the immediately preceding period, nothing more admirable than the spirit which inspires them. He had come into the heart of a revolution, exposed to the same perils as those which had wrecked the similar movement in Italy. Neither trusting too much nor distrusting too much, with a clear head and a good will he set about enforcing a series of excellent measures. From first to last he was engaged in denouncing dissension, in advocating unity, in doing everything that man could do to concentrate and utilize the disorderly elements with which he had to work. He occupied himself in repairing fortifications, managing ships, restraining license, promoting courtesy between the foes, and regulating the disposal of the sinews of war.

On the morning of January 22d, his last birthday, he came from his room to Stanhope’s, and said, smiling, “You were complaining that I never write any poetry now,” and read the familiar stanzas beginning

beginning ” ‘Tis time this heart should be unmoved,”

and ending

Seek out— less often sought than found —
A soldier’s grave, for thee the best ;
Then look around, and choose thy ground,
And take thy rest”

[Complete poem – jl]

High thoughts, high resolves; but the brain that was overtasked, and the frame that was outworn, would be tasked and worn little longer. The lamp of a life that had burned too fiercely was flickering to its close. “If we are not taken off with the sword,” he writes on February 5th, “we are like to march off with an ague in this mud-basket; and, to conclude with a very bad pun, better ‘martially’ than ‘marsh-ally.’ The dikes of Holland when broken down are the deserts of Arabia in comparison with Missolonghi.” In April, when it was too late, Stanhope wrote from Salona, in Phocis, imploring him not to sacrifice health and perhaps life “in that bog.”

Byron’s house stood in the midst of the exhalations of a muddy creek, and his natural irritability was increased by a more than usually long ascetic regimen. In spite of his strength of purpose, his temper was not always proof against the rapacity and turbulence by which he was surrounded. About the middle of February, when the artillery had been got into readiness for the attack on Lepanto — the northern (as Patras was the southern) gate of the gulf, still in the hands of the Turks — the expedition was thrown back by an unexpected rising of the Suliotes.

These peculiarly forward Greeks, chronically seditious by nature, were on this occasion, as afterward appeared, stirred up by emissaries of Colocotronis, who, though assuming the position of the rival of Maurocordatos, was simply a brigand on a large scale in the Morea. Exasperation at this mutiny, and the vexation of having to abandon a cherished scheme, seem to have been the immediately provoking causes of a violent convulsive fit which, on the evening of the 15th, attacked the poet and endangered his life. Next day he was better, but complained of weight in the head, and, the doctors applying leeches too close to the temporal artery, he was bled till he fainted.

And now occurred the last of those striking incidents so frequent in his life, in reference to which we may quote the joint testimony of two witnesses. Colonel Stanhope writes: “Soon after his dreadful paroxysm, when he was lying on his sick-bed, with his whole nervous system completely shaken, the mutinous Suliotes, covered with dirt and splendid attires, broke into his apartments, brandishing their costly arms and loudly demanding their rights. Lord Byron, electrified by this unexpected act, seemed to recover from his sickness; and the more the Suliotes raged the more his calm courage triumphed. The scene was truly sub lime.” “It is impossible,” says Count Gamba, “to do justice to the coolness and magnanimity which he displayed upon every trying occasion. Upon trifling occasions, he was certainly irritable; but the aspect of danger calmed him in an instant, and re stored him the free exercise of all the powers of his noble nature. A more undaunted man in the hour of peril never breathed.” A few days later, the riot being renewed, the disorderly crew were, on payment of their arrears, finally dismissed; but several of the English artificers under Parry left about the same time, in fear of their lives.

On the 4th, the last of the long list of Byron’s letters to Moore resents, with some bitterness, the hasty acceptance of a rumor that he had been quietly writing Don Juan in some Ionian Island. At the same date he writes to Kennedy, ” I am not unaware of the precarious state of my health. But it is proper I should remain in Greece, and it were better to die doing something than nothing.”

Lewis Sergeant began here. John Nichol began here.

More information here and here, and below.