Gebir | Page 4

the best writer of Latin verse among his boys, but
one ready to fight him over difference of opinion about a Latin quantity.
In 1793 Landor went to Trinity College, Oxford. He had been got rid of
at Rugby as unmanageable. After two years at Oxford, he was
rusticated; thereupon he gave up his chambers, and refused to return.
Landor's father, who had been much tried by his unmanageable temper,
then allowed him 150 pounds a year to live with as he pleased, away
from home. He lived in South Wales--at Swansea, Tenby, or
elsewhere--and he sometimes went home to Warwick for short visits. In
South Wales he gave himself to full communion with the poets and
with Nature, and he fastened with particular enthusiasm upon Milton.
Lord Aylmer, who lived near Tenby, was among his friends. Rose
Aylmer, whose name he has made through death imperishable, by
linking it with a few lines of perfect music, {1} lent Landor "The
Progress of Romance," a book published in 1785, by Clara Reeve, in
which he found the description of an Arabian tale that suggested to him
his poem of "Gebir."
Landor began "Gebir" in Latin, then turned it into English, and then
vigorously condensed what he had written. The poem was first
published at Warwick as a sixpenny pamphlet in the year 1798, when
Landor's age was twenty-three. Robert Southey was among the few

who bought it, and he first made known its power. In the best sense of
the phrase, "Gebir" was written in classical English, not with a search
for pompous words of classical origin to give false dignity to style, but
with strict endeavour to form terse English lines of apt words well
compacted. Many passages appear to have been half thought out in
Greek or Latin, some, as that on the sea-shell (on page 19), were first
written in Latin, and Landor re-issued "Gebir" with a translation into
Latin three or four years after its first appearance.
"Gebir" was written nine years after the outbreak of the French
Revolution, and at a time when the victories of Napoleon were in many
minds associated with the hopes of man. In the first edition of the poem
there were, in the nuptial voyage of Tamar, prophetic visions of the
triumph of his race, in march of the French Republic from the Garonne
to the Rhine -
"How grand a prospect opens! Alps o'er Alps
Tower, to survey the
triumphs that proceed.
Here, while Garumna dances in the gloom

Of larches, mid her naiads, or reclined
Leans on a broom-clad bank to
watch the sports
Of some far-distant chamois silken haired,
The
chaste Pyrene, drying up her tears,
Finds, with your children, refuge:
yonder, Rhine
Lays his imperial sceptre at your feet."
The hope of the purer spirits in the years of revolution, expressed by
Wordsworth's
"War shall cease,
Did ye not hear, that conquest is abjured?"
was in the first design of "Gebir," and in those early years of hope
Landor joined to the vision of the future for the sons of Tamar that,
"Captivity led captive, war o'erthrown,
They shall o'er Europe, shall
o'er earth extend
Empire that seas alone and skies confine,
And
glory that shall strike the crystal stars."
Landor was led by the failure of immediate expectation to revise his
poem and omit from the third and the sixth books about one hundred

and fifty lines, while adding fifty to heal over the wounds made by
excision. As the poem stands, it is a rebuke of tyrannous ambition in
the tale of Gebir, prince of Boetic Spain, from whom Gibraltar took its
name. Gebir, bound by a vow to his dying father in the name of
ancestral feud to invade Egypt, prepares invasion, but yields in Egypt
to the touch of love, seeks to rebuild the ruins of the past, and learns
what are the fruits of ambition. This he learns in the purgatory of
conquerors, where he sees the figures of the Stuarts, of William the
Deliverer, and of George the Third, "with eyebrows white and slanting
brow," intentionally confused with Louis XVI. to avoid a charge of
treason. But the strength of Landor's sympathy with the French
Revolution and of his contempt for George III. was more evident in the
first form of the poem. Parallel with the quenching in Gebir of the
conqueror's ambition, and with the ruin of his life and its new hope by
the destroying powers that our misunderstandings of the better life
bring into play, runs that part of the poem which shows Tamar, his
brother, preparing to dwell with the sea nymph, the ideal, far away
from all the struggle of mankind.
Recognition of the great beauty of Lander's "Gebir" came first from
Southey in "The Critical Review." Southey found that the poem grew
upon him, and became afterwards Landor's