George Gordon Byron

“ Is with the dashing of the spring-tide foam,⁠10
That drives the sailor shipless to his home,
Are they to those that were; and thus they creep,
Crouching and crab-like, through their sapping streets.
Oh! agony—that centuries should reap
No mellower harvest! Thirteen hundred years
Of wealth and glory turn’d to dust and tears;
And every monument the stranger meets,
Church, palace, pillar, as a mourner greets ”

“ Our strength away in wrestling with the air;
For ’tis our nature strikes us down: the beasts
Slaughter’d in hourly hecatombs for feasts
Are of as high an order—they must go
Even where their driver goads them, though to slaughter. ”