The browsing camels’ bells are tinkling—
   His mother look’d from her lattice high;
She saw the dews of eve besprinkling
   The parterre green beneath her eye:
She saw the planets faintly twinkling—
   ’Tis twilight—sure his train is nigh.
She could not rest in the garden bower,
But gazed through the grate of his steepest tower:
Why comes he not—and his steeds are fleet—
Nor shrink they from the summer heat?
Why sends not the bridegroom his promised gift;
Is his heart more cold or his barb less swift?

His Lordship was well read in the Bible, and the book of Judges, chap. 5, and verse 28, has the following passage:—

“The mother of Sisera looked out at a window, and cried through the lattice, Why is his chariot so long in coming; why tarry the wheels of his chariot?”

It was, indeed, an early trick of his Lordship to filch good things.  In the lamentation for Kirke White, in which he compares him to an eagle wounded by an arrow feathered from his own wing, he says,

So the struck eagle, stretch’d upon the plain,
No more through rolling clouds to soar again,
View’d his own feather on the fatal dart
And winged the shaft that quivered in his heart.

The ancients have certainly stolen the best ideas of the moderns; this very thought may be found in the works of that ancient-modern, Waller:

That eagle’s fate and mine are one,
   Which on the shaft that made him die,
Espied a feather of his own
   Wherewith he wont to soar on high.

His Lordship disdained to commit any larceny on me; and no doubt the following passage from The Giaour is perfectly original:

It is as if the dead could feel
The icy worm around them steal;
And shudder as the reptiles creep
To revel o’er their rotting sleep,
Without the power to scare away
The cold consumers of their clay.

I do not claim any paternity in these lines: but not the most judicious action of all my youth was to publish certain dramatic sketches, and his Lordship had the printed book in his possession long before The Giaour was published, and may have read the following passage in a dream, which was intended to be very hideous:

Then did I hear around
The churme and chirruping of busy reptiles
At hideous banquet on the royal dead:—
Full soon methought the loathsome epicures
Came thick on me, and underneath my shroud
I felt the many-foot and beetle creep,
And on my breast the cold worm coil and crawl.