These antique obsequies were undoubtedly affecting; but the return of the mourners from the burning is the most appalling orgia, without the horror of crime, of which I have ever heard.  When the duty was done, and the ashes collected, they dined and drank much together, and bursting from the calm mastery with which they had repressed their feelings during the solemnity, gave way to frantic exultation.  They were all drunk; they sang, they shouted, and their barouche was driven like a whirlwind through the forest.  I can conceive nothing descriptive of the demoniac revelry of that flight, but scraps of the dead man’s own song of Faust, Mephistophiles, and Ignis Fatuus, in alternate chorus.

The limits of the sphere of dream,
   The bounds of true and false are past;
Lead us on, thou wand’ring Gleam;
   Lead us onwards, far and fast,
To the wide, the desert waste.

But see how swift, advance and shift,
   Trees behind trees—row by row,
Now clift by clift, rocks bend and lift,
   Their frowning foreheads as we go;
The giant-snouted crags, ho! ho!
   How they snort, and how they blow.
Honour her to whom honour is due,
Old mother Baubo, honour to you.
An able sow with old Baubo upon her
Is worthy of glory and worthy of honour.

The way is wide, the way is long,
But what is that for a Bedlam throng?
Some on a ram, and some on a prong,
On poles and on broomsticks we flutter along.

Every trough will be boat enough,
With a rag for a sail, we can sweep through the sky.
Who flies not to-night, when means he to fly?

CHAPTER XL

Table of Contents

“The Two Foscari”—“Werner”—“The Deformed Transformed”—“Don Juan”—“The Liberal”—Removes from Pisa to Genoa

I have never heard exactly where the tragedy of The Two Foscari was written: that it was imagined in Venice is probable.  The subject is, perhaps, not very fit for a drama, for it has no action; but it is rich in tragic materials, revenge and affection, and the composition is full of the peculiar stuff of the poet’s own mind.  The exulting sadness with which Jacopo Foscari looks in the first scene from the window, on the Adriatic, is Byron himself recalling his enjoyment of the sea.

How many a time have I
Cloven with arm still lustier, heart more daring,
The wave all roughen’d: with a swimmer’s stroke
Flinging the billows back from my drench’d hair,
And laughing from my lip th’ audacious brine
Which kiss’d it like a wine-cup.

The whole passage, both prelude and remainder, glows with the delicious recollections of laying and revelling in the summer waves.  But the exile’s feeling is no less beautifully given and appropriate to the author’s condition, far more so, indeed, than to that of Jacopo Foscari.