Gebir, and Count Julian

Transcribed from the 1887 Cassell & Company edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
CASSELL’S NATIONAL LIBRARY
BY WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited: LONDON , PARIS , NEW YORK & MELBOURNE . 1887
Landor began “Gebir” in Latin, then turned it into English, and then vigorously condensed what he had written. The poem was first published at Warwick as a sixpenny pamphlet in the year 1798, when Landor’s age was twenty-three. Robert Southey was among the few who bought it, and he first made known its power. In the best sense of the phrase, “Gebir” was written in classical English, not with a search for pompous words of classical origin to give false dignity to style, but with strict endeavour to form terse English lines of apt words well compacted. Many passages appear to have been half thought out in Greek or Latin, some, as that on the sea-shell (on page 19), were first written in Latin, and Landor re-issued “Gebir” with a translation into Latin three or four years after its first appearance.
“Gebir” was written nine years after the outbreak of the French Revolution, and at a time when the victories of Napoleon were in many minds associated with the hopes of man. In the first edition of the poem there were, in the nuptial voyage of Tamar, prophetic visions of the triumph of his race, in march of the French Republic from the Garonne to the Rhine—
“How grand a prospect opens! Alps o’er Alps Tower, to survey the triumphs that proceed. Here, while Garumna dances in the gloom Of larches, mid her naiads, or reclined Leans on a broom-clad bank to watch the sports Of some far-distant chamois silken haired, The chaste Pyrené, drying up her tears, Finds, with your children, refuge: yonder, Rhine Lays his imperial sceptre at your feet.”
The hope of the purer spirits in the years of revolution, expressed by Wordsworth’s
“War shall cease, Did ye not hear, that conquest is abjured?”
was in the first design of “Gebir,” and in those early years of hope Landor joined to the vision of the future for the sons of Tamar that,