Ashtaroth disappears with the Abbot, singing as follows:—

A prodigal son, and a maid undone,[B]
And a widow re-wedded within the year;
And a worldly monk, and a pregnant nun,
Are things which every day appear.

Manfred alone.

Man. Why would this fool break in on me, and force50
My art to pranks fantastical?—no matter,
It was not of my seeking. My heart sickens,
And weighs a fixed foreboding on my soul.
But it is calm—calm as a sullen sea
After the hurricane; the winds are still,
But the cold waves swell high and heavily,
And there is danger in them. Such a rest
Is no repose. My life hath been a combat,
And every thought a wound, till I am scarred
In the immortal part of me.—What now?]60

[A] "Raven-stone (Rabenstein), a translation of the German word for the gibbet, which in Germany and Switzerland is permanent, and made of stone." [Compare Werner, act ii. sc. 2. Compare, too, Anster's Faust, 1883, p. 306.]

[B]

A prodigal son—and a pregnant nun, nun,
And a widow re-wedded within the year—
And a calf at grass—and a priest at mass.
Are things which every day appear.—[MS. erased.]

155 [A supplementary MS. supplies the text for the remainder of the scene.]

156 [For the death of Nero, "Rome's sixth Emperor," vide C. Suet. Tranq., lib. vi. cap. xlix.]

bd

To shun { not loss of life, but the torments of a } public death—[MS. M.]

157 [A reminiscence of the clouds of spray from the Fall of the Staubbach, which, in certain aspects, appear to be springing upwards from the bed of the waterfall.]

158 [Compare The Giaour, lines 282-284. Compare, too, Don Juan, Canto IV. stanza lvii. line 8.]

159 [Here, as in so many other passages of Manfred, Byron is recording his own feelings and forebodings. The same note is struck in the melancholy letters of the autumn of 1811. See, for example, the letter to Dallas, October 11, "It seems as though I were to experience in my youth the greatest misery of age," etc. (Letters, 1898, ii. 52).]

160 ["Pray, was Manfred's speech to the Sun still retained in Act third? I hope so: it was one of the best in the thing, and better than the Colosseum."—Letter to Murray, July 9, 1817, Letters, 1900, iv. 147. Compare Byron's early rendering of "Ossian's Address to the Sun 'in Carthon.'"—Poetical Works, 1898, i. 229.]

161 "And it came to pass, that the Sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair," etc.—"There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the Sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown."—Genesis, ch. vi. verses 2 and 4.

162 [For the "Chaldeans" and "mountain-tops," see Childe Harold, Canto III, stanza xiv. line i, and stanza xci. lines 1-3.]

be Some strange things in these far years.—[MS. M.]