All the living things that heard
That deadly earth-shock disappeared;
The wild birds flew; the wild dogs fled,
And howling left the unburied dead;
The camels from their keepers broke,
The distant steer forsook the yoke—
The nearer steed plunged o'er the plain,
And burst his girth, and tore his rein;
The bull-frog's note, from out the marsh,
Deep-mouthed arose, and doubly harsh
The wolves yelled on the caverned hill,
Where echo rolled in thunder still;
The jackal's troop, in gathered cry,
Bayed from afar complainingly,
With a mixed and mournful sound,
Like crying babe, and beaten hound:
With sudden wing and ruffled breast
The eagle left his rocky nest,
And mounted nearer to the sun,
The clouds beneath him seemed so dun;
Their smoke assailed his startled beak,
And made him higher soar and shriek.
Thus was Corinth lost and won!
IV. FINAL CONQUEST OF GREECE BY TURKEY.
The fall of Corinth opened the way to a successful advance of the Turkish forces through the Peloponnesus, and the Venetians were soon compelled to abandon it. By the peace of Passä'rowitz, in 1718, the whole of Greece was again surrendered to Turkey, and under her rule the country, divided into military districts called Pasha'lics, sunk into a deplorable condition which the progress of time did nothing to ameliorate. The Greeks, being virtually reduced to bondage, suffered untold miseries from the rapacity and barbarism of their masters. Says the historian, SIR EMERSON TENNENT, "So undefined was the system of extortion, and so uncontrolled the power of those to whose execution it was intrusted, that the evil spread over the whole system of administration, and insinuated itself with a polypous fertility into every relation and ordinance of society, till there were few actions or occupations of the Greeks that were not burdened with the scrutiny and interference of their masters, and none that did not suffer, in a greater or less degree, from their heartless rapine." For four centuries and over the Greeks suffered under this despotism, which stamped out industry and education, and tended to the extinction of every manly trait in the people, while it also developed the native vices of the Hellenic character.
In a poem written in 1786 by the afterward celebrated British statesman, GEORGE CANNING, the writer, after paying a handsome tribute to the greatness and glory of the Greece of olden time, draws the following truthful picture of her degeneracy in his own day:
The Slavery of Greece.
Oh, how changed thy fame,
And all thy glories fading into shame!
What! that thy bold, thy freedom-breathing land
Should crouch beneath a tyrant's stern command!
That servitude should bind in galling chain
Whom Asia's millions once opposed in vain,
Who could have thought? Who sees without a groan
Thy cities mouldering and thy walls o'erthrown;
That where once towered the stately, solemn fane,
Now moss-grown ruins strew the ravaged plain;
And, unobserved but by the traveller's eye,
Proud, vaulted domes in fretted fragments lie;
And the fallen column, on the dusty ground,
Pale ivy throws its sluggish arms around?
Thy sons (sad change!) in abject bondage sigh;
Unpitied toil, and unlamented die;
Groan at the labors of the galling oar,
Or the dark caverns of the mine explore.
The glittering tyranny of Othman's sons,
The pomp of horror which surrounds their thrones,
Have awed their servile spirits into fear;
Spurned by the foot, they tremble and revere.
The day of labor, night's sad, sleepless hour,
The inflictive scourge of arbitrary power,
The bloody terror of the pointed steel,
The murderous stake, the agonizing wheel,
And (dreadful choice!) the bowstring or the bowl,
Damps their faint vigor and unmans the soul.
Disastrous fate! Still tears will fill the eye,
Still recollection prompt the mournful sigh,
When to the mind recurs thy former fame,
And all the horrors of thy present shame.
In 1810-'11 the poet BYRON spent considerable time in Greece, visiting its many scenes of historic interest, and noting the condition of its people. Here he wrote the second canto of Childe Harold, in which the following fine apostrophe and appeal to Greece, still under Moslem rule, are found:
Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth!
Immortal, though no more; though fallen, great!
Who now shall lead thy scattered children forth,
And long accustomed bondage uncreate?
Not such thy sons who whilom did await,
The hopeless warriors of a willing doom,
In bleak Thermopylæ's sepulchral strait—
Oh, who that gallant spirit shall resume,
Leap from Euro'ta's banks, and call thee from the tomb?
Spirit of Freedom! when on Phy'le's brow
Thou sat'st with Thrasybu'lus and his train,
Couldst thou forebode the dismal hour which now
Dims the green beauties of thine Attic plain?
Not thirty tyrants now enforce the chain,
But every carle can lord it o'er thy land;
Nor rise thy sons, but idly rail in vain,
Trembling beneath the scourge of Turkish hand,
From birth till death enslaved; in word, in deed, unmanned.