In the language of Hassan, an attendant of Mahmoud, the poet then summarizes the events attending the opening of the struggle, giving a picture of the course of European politics—Egypt sending her armies and fleets to aid the Sultan against the rebel world; England, Queen of Ocean, upon her island throne, holding herself aloof from the contest; Russia, indifferent whether Greece or Turkey conquers, but watching to stoop upon the victor; and Austria, while hating freedom, yet fearing the success of freedom's enemies. The poet could not foresee that change in English politics which subsequently permitted England, aided by France and Russia, to interfere in behalf of Greece. Hassan says:
"The anarchies of Africa unleash
Their tempest-winged cities of the sea,
To speak in thunder to the rebel world.
Like sulphurous clouds, half shattered by the storm,
They sweep the pale Ægean, while the Queen
Of Ocean, bound upon her island throne,
Far in the West, sits mourning that her sons,
Who frown on Freedom, spare a smile for thee:
Russia still hovers, as an eagle might
Within a cloud, near which a kite and crane
Hang tangled in inextricable fight,
To stoop upon the victor; for she fears
The name of Freedom, even as she hates thine;
But recreant Austria loves thee as the grave
Loves pestilence; and her slow dogs of war,
Fleshed with the chase, come up from Italy,
And howl upon their limits; for they see
The panther Freedom fled to her old cover
Amid seas and mountains, and a mightier brood
Crouch around."
Although Hassan recounts the numbers of the Sultan's armies, and the strength of his forts and arsenals, yet the desponding Mahmoud, watching the declining moon, thus symbolizes it as the wan emblem of his fading power:
"Look, Hassan, on yon crescent moon, emblazoned
Upon that shattered flag of fiery cloud
Which leads the rear of the departing day,
Wan emblem of an empire fading now!
See how it trembles in the blood-red air,
And, like a mighty lamp whose oil is spent,
Shrinks on the horizon's edge—while, from above,
One star, with insolent and victorious light
Hovers above its fall, and with keen beams,
Like arrows through a fainting antelope,
Strikes its weak form to death."
As messenger after messenger approaches, and informs the Sultan of the revolutionary risings in different parts of his empire, he refuses to hear more, and takes refuge in that fatalistic philosophy which is an unfailing resource of the followers of the Prophet in all their reverses:
"I'll hear no more! too long
We gaze on danger through the mist of fear,
And multiply upon our shattered hopes
The images of ruin. Come what will!
To-morrow and to-morrow are as lamps
Set in our path to light us to the edge,
Through rough and smooth; nor can we suffer aught
Which He inflicts not, in whose hands we are."
When the Jew, Ahasuerus, at length arrives, he speaks in oracular terms, and calls up visions which increase the Sultan's fears; and when the latter hears shouts of transient victory over the Greeks, he regards it but as the expiring gleam which serves to make the coming darkness the more terrible. He thus soliloquizes:
"Weak lightning before darkness! poor faint smile
Of dying Islam! Voice which art the response
Of hollow weakness! Do I wake, and live,
Were there such things? or may the unquiet brain,
Vexed by the wise mad talk of the old Jew,
Have shaped itself these shadows of its fear?
It matters not! for naught we see, or dream,
Possess or lose, or grasp at, can be worth
More than it gives or teaches. Come what may,
The future must become the past, and I
As they were, to whom once the present hour,
This gloomy crag of time to which I cling,
Seemed an Elysian isle of peace and joy
Never to be attained."
Although the poet predicts series of disasters and periods of gloom for struggling Greece, yet, at the close of the poem, a brighter age than any she has known is represented as gleaming upon her "through the sunset of hope."
The year 1822 opened with the assembling of the first Greek congress at Epidau'rus, the proclaiming of a provisional constitution on the 13th of January, and the issuing, on the 27th, of a declaration that announced the union of all Greece, with an independent federative government under the presidency of Alexander Mavrocordä'to. But the Greeks, unaccustomed to exercise the rights of freemen, were unable at once to establish a wise and firm government: they often quarreled among themselves; and those who had exercised an independent authority under the government of the Turks were with difficulty induced to submit to the control of the central government. The few men of intelligence and liberal views among them had a difficult task to perform; but the wretchedly undisciplined state of the Turkish armies aided its successful accomplishment. The principal military events of the year were the terrible massacre of the inhabitants of the Island of Scio by the Turks in April; the defeat of the latter in the Morea, where more than twenty thousand of them were slain; the successes of the Greek fire-ships, by which many Turkish vessels were destroyed; and the surrender to the Greeks of Nap'oli di Roma'nia, the ancient Nauplia, the port of Argos. By the destruction of the Island of Scio a paradise was changed into a scene of desolation, and more than forty thousand persons were killed or sold into slavery. Soon after, one hundred and fifty villages in southern Macedonia experienced the fate of Scio; and the pasha of Saloni'ca boasted that he had destroyed, in one day, fifteen hundred women and children.