He is represented as revelling in the visions of ambition.
| In dreams through camp and court he bore The trophies of a conqueror; In dreams his song of triumph heard; Then wore his monarch's signet ring: Then pressed that monarch's throne—a king; As wild his thoughts and gay of wing As Eden's garden bird. |
In direct contrast to this we have Bozzaris watchful in the forest, and ranging his band of Suliotes on the ground, and amid the memories, of Platœa. An hour elapses, and the Turk awakes from his visions of false glory—to die. But Bozzaris dies—to awake. He dies in the flush of victory to awake, in death, to an ultimate certainty of Freedom. Then follows an invocation to Death. His terrors under ordinary circumstances are contrasted with the glories of the dissolution of Bozzaris, in which the approach of the Destroyer is
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welcome as the cry That told the Indian isles were nigh To the world-seeking Genoese, When the land-wind from woods of palm, And orange groves and fields of balm, Blew o'er the Haytian seas. |
The poem closes with the poetical apotheosis of Marco Bozzaris as
| One of the few, the immortal names That are not born to die. |
It will be seen that these arrangements of the subject are skilfully contrived—perhaps they are a little too evident, and we are enabled too readily by the perusal of one passage, to anticipate the succeeding. The rhythm is highly artificial. The stanzas are well adapted for vigorous expression—the fifth will afford a just specimen of the versification of the whole poem.
| Come to the bridal Chamber, Death! Come to the mother's, when she feels For the first time her first born's breath; Come when the blessed seals That close the pestilence are broke, And crowded cities wail its stroke; Come in consumption's ghastly form, The earthquake shock, the ocean storm; Come when the heart beats high and warm, With banquet song, and dance, and wine; And thou art terrible—the tear, The groan, the knell, the pall, the bier; And all we know, or dream, or fear Of agony, are thine. |
Granting, however, to Marco Bozzaris, the minor excellences we have pointed out, we should be doing our conscience great wrong in calling it, upon the whole, any thing more than a very ordinary matter. It is surpassed, even as a lyric, by a multitude of foreign and by many American compositions of a similar character. To Ideality it has few pretensions, and the finest portion of the poem is probably to be found in the verses we have quoted elsewhere—
| Thy grasp is welcome as the hand Of brother in a foreign land; Thy summons welcome as the cry That told the Indian isles were nigh To the world-seeking Genoese, When the land-wind from woods of palm And orange groves, and fields of balm Blew o'er the Haytian seas. |