Zoe mou sas agapo.
Maid of Athens! I am gone.
Think of me, sweet! when alone,
Though I fly to Istambol,
Athens holds my heart and soul:
Can I cease to love thee? No!
Zoe mou sas agapo.
The heroine of this poem died in London ten or twelve years ago. For some time previously she had been in poverty and when, about 1870, a subscription was started for her, Gounod composed an air to Byron’s “Maid of Athens” which produced about £20 towards the fund for the benefit of Mrs. Black, as she then was. It is said that Lord Byron wrote the poem in Athens, about 1810, when he was quite a young man, but I have never yet seen any mention made of the wonderful similarity between it, and the following ballad which appeared in The Monthly Mirror, November 1799:—
Ballad.
Addressed “to her I dearly love.”