Mosaics of Grecian History by Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

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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 Mavrocordae'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.

Goaded to desperation, rather than disheartened by their reverses
and the remorseless cruelties of the Turks, the Greeks struggled
bravely on, and during the year 1823 the results of the contest
were generally in their favor. They often proved themselves worthy
sons of those who fell

"In bleak Thermopylae's strait,"

or on the plains of Marathon. Their patriotic determination to be
free, or die in the attempt, is happily reflected in the following
lines by the poet CAMPBELL, whose heart beat in sympathy with their
efforts for liberty.

Song of the Greeks.

Again to the battle, Achaians!
Our hearts bid the tyrants defiance!
Our land--the first garden of Liberty's tree--
It hath been, and shall yet be, the land of the free;
For the Cross of our faith is replanted,
The pale, dying crescent is daunted,
And we march that the footprints of Mahomet's slaves
May be washed out in blood from our forefathers' graves.
Their spirits are hovering o'er us,
And the sword shall to glory restore us.

Ah! what though no succor advances,
Nor Christendom's chivalrous lances
Are stretched in our aid? Be the combat our own!
And we'll perish or conquer more proudly alone!
For we've sworn by our country's assaulters,
By the virgins they've dragged from our altars,
By our massacred patriots, our children in chains,
By our heroes of old, and their blood in our veins,
That, living, we shall be victorious,
Or that, dying, our deaths shall be glorious!

A breath of submission we breathe not:
The sword that we've drawn we will sheathe not;
Its scabbard is left where our martyrs are laid,
And the vengeance of ages has whetted its blade.
Earth may hide, waves ingulf, fire consume us;
But they shall not to slavery doom us.
If they rule, it shall be o'er our ashes and graves:
But we've smote them already with fire on the waves,
And new triumphs on land are before us--
To the charge!--Heaven's banner is o'er us.

This day shall ye blush for its story,
Or brighten your lives with its glory.
Our women--oh say, shall they shriek in despair,
Or embrace us from conquest, with wreaths in their hair?
Accursed may his memory blacken,
If a coward there be who would slacken
Till we've trampled the turban, and shown ourselves worth
Being sprung from, and named for, the godlike of earth.
Strike home! and the world shall revere us
As heroes descended from heroes.

Old Greece lightens up with emotion!
Her inlands, her isles of the ocean,
Fanes rebuilt, and fair towns, shall with jubilee ring,
And the Nine shall new hallow their Helicon's spring.
Our hearths shall be kindled in gladness,
That were cold and extinguished in sadness;
While our maidens shall dance, with their white waving arms,
Singing joy to the brave that delivered their charms,
When the blood of yon Mussulman cravens
Shall have crimsoned the beaks of our ravens!

AMERICAN SYMPATHY WITH GREECE.

The progress of events in 1822 and 1823 made friends for the
Greeks wherever free principles were cherished; and from England
and America large contributions of money, clothing, and provisions,
were forwarded to relieve the sufferings inflicted by the wanton
cruelties of the Turks. It was the United States, however, as
the first American Minister to Greece, MR. TUCKERMAN, says, that
first responded, "in the words of President Monroe, Webster,
Clay, Everett, Dwight, and hosts of other lights," to the appeal
of the Greek senate at Kalamaeta, made in 1821. When Congress
assembled in December, 1823, President Monroe made the revolution
in Greece the subject of a paragraph in his annual message, in
which he expressed the hope of success to the Greeks and disaster
to the Turks; and Mr. Webster subsequently introduced a resolution
in the House of Representatives providing for the appointment
of an agent or commissioner to Greece. These were the first
official expressions favorable to the struggling country uttered
by any government; and in speaking to his resolution in January,
1824, Mr. Webster began his remarks as follows:

"An occasion which calls the attention to a spot so distinguished,
so connected with interesting recollections, as Greece, may
naturally create something of warmth and enthusiasm. In a grave
political discussion, however, it is necessary that those feelings
should be chastened. I shall endeavor properly to repress them,
although it is impossible that they should be altogether
extinguished. We must, indeed, fly beyond the civilized world;
we must pass the dominion of law and the boundaries of knowledge;
we must, more especially, withdraw ourselves from this place,
and the scenes and objects which here surround us, if we would
separate ourselves entirely from the influence of all those
memorials of herself which ancient Greece has transmitted for
the admiration and the benefit of mankind. This free form of
government, this popular assembly--the common council for the
common good--where have we contemplated its earliest models?
This practice of free debate and public discussion, the contest
of mind with mind, and that popular eloquence which, if it were
now here, on a subject like this, would move the stones of the
Capitol--whose was the language in which all these were first
exhibited? Even the edifice in which we assemble, these
proportioned columns, this ornamented architecture, all remind
us that Greece has existed, and that we, like the rest of mankind,
are greatly her debtors.

"But I have not introduced this motion in the vain hope of
discharging anything of this accumulated debt of centuries. I
have not acted upon the expectation that we who have inherited
this obligation from our ancestors should now attempt to pay it
to those who may seem to have inherited from their ancestors a
right to receive payment. My object is nearer and more immediate.
I wish to take occasion of the struggle of an interesting and
gallant people in the cause of liberty and Christianity, to draw
the attention of the House to the circumstances which have
accompanied that struggle, and to the principles which appear
to have governed the conduct of the great states of Europe in
regard to it, and to the effects and consequences of these
principles upon the independence of nations, and especially upon
the institutions of free governments. What I have to say of Greece,
therefore, concerns the modern, not the ancient--the living,
and not the dead. It regards her, not as she exists in history,
triumphant over time, and tyranny, and ignorance, but as she
now is, contending against fearful odds for being, and for the
common privileges of human nature."

In an argument of some length Mr. Webster forcibly condemns the
then existing policy of the European Powers, who, holding that
all changes in legislation and administration "ought to proceed
from kings alone," were therefore "wholly inexorable to the
sufferings of the Greeks, and entirely hostile to their success."
He demands that the protest of this government shall be made
against this policy, both as it is laid down in principle and
as it is applied in practice; and he closes his address with
the following references to the determination of the Greeks and
the sympathy their struggle should receive:

"Constantinople and the northern provinces have sent forth
thousands of troops; they have been defeated. Tripoli, and Algiers,
and Egypt have contributed their marine contingents; they have
not kept the ocean. Hordes of Tartars have crossed the Bosphorus;
they have died where the Persians died. The powerful monarchies
in the neighborhood have denounced the Greek cause, and admonished
the Greeks to abandon it and submit to their fate. They have
answered that, although two hundred thousand of their countrymen
have offered up their lives, there yet remain lives to offer;
and that it is the determination of all--'yes, of ALL'--to persevere
until they shall have established their liberty, or until the
power of their oppressors shall have relieved them from the burden
of existence. It may now be asked, perhaps, whether the expression
of our own sympathy, and that of the country, may do them good?
I hope it may. It may give them courage and spirit; it may assure
them of public regard, teach them that they are not wholly
forgotten by the civilized world, and inspire them with constancy
in the pursuit of their great end. At any rate, it appears to
me that the measure which I have proposed is due to our own
character, and called for by our own duty. When we have discharged
that duty we may leave the rest to the disposition of Providence.
I am not of those who would, in the hour of utmost peril, withhold
such encouragement as might be properly and lawfully given, and,
when the crisis should be past, overwhelm the rescued sufferer
with kindness and caresses. The Greeks address the civilized
world with a pathos not easy to be resisted. They invoke our
favor by more moving considerations than can well belong to the
condition of any other people. They stretch out their arms to
the Christian communities of the earth, beseeching them, by a
generous recollection of their ancestors, by the consideration
of their desolated and ruined cities and villages, by their wives
and children sold into an accursed slavery, by their blood, which
they seem willing to pour out like water, by the common faith
and in the name which unites all Christians, that they would
extend to them at least some token of compassionate regard."

THE SORTIE AT MISSOLONGHI.

One of the noted exploits of the Greeks in 1823, and one that has
been commemorated in many ways, occurred at Missolon'ghi, the
capital of Acarnania and AEtolia, while that town was besieged by
a Turkish army; and the name of Marco Boz-zar'is, the commander
of the garrison, has ever since been classed with that of Leonidas
and other heroes of ancient Greece who fell in the moment of
victory. In his Crescent and the Cross; or, Romance and Realities
of Eastern Travel, the English author WARBURTON thus tells the
story of the well-known deed that saved Missolonghi to the Greeks
and hastened the delivery of their country:

"When Missolonghi was beleaguered by the Turkish forces, Marco
Bozzaris commanded a garrison of about twelve hundred men, who
had barely fortifications enough to form breastworks. Intelligence
reached him that an Egyptian army was about to form a junction
with the formidable besieging host. A parade was ordered of the
garrison, 'faint and few, but fearless still.' Bozzaris told
them of the destruction that impended over Missolonghi, proposed
a sortie, and announced that it should consist only of volunteers.
Volunteers! The whole garrison stepped forward as one man, and
demanded the post of honor and of death. 'I will only take the
Thermopylae number,' said their leader; and he selected the three
hundred from his true and trusty Suliotes. In the dead of night
this devoted band marched out in six divisions, which were placed,
in profound silence, around the Turkish camp. Their orders were
simply, 'When you hear my bugle blow seek me in the pasha's tent.'

"Marco Bozzaris, disguised as an Albanian bearing dispatches
to the pasha from the Egyptian army, passed unquestioned through
the Turkish camp, and was only arrested by the sentinels around
the pasha's tent, who informed him that he must wait till morning.
Then wildly through the stillness of the night that bugle blew;
faithfully it was echoed from without; and the war-cry of the
avenging Greek broke upon the Moslem's ear. From every side that
terrible storm seemed to break at once; shrieks of agony and
terror swelled the tumult. The Turks fled in all directions,
and the Grecian leader was soon surrounded by his comrades. Struck
to the ground by a musket-ball, he had himself raised on the
shoulders of two Greeks; and, thus supported, he pressed on the
flying enemy. Another bullet pierced his brain in the hour of
his triumph, and he was borne dead from the field of his glory."
But Missolonghi was saved, and under Constantine and Noto Bozzaris,
brothers of the dead hero, it withstood repeated assaults of
the Turks, until, in 1826, after having been besieged for over
a year by a very large naval and military force, it was finally
taken. Those left of the small garrison who were able to fight,
placing the women in the center, sallied forth at midnight of
the 22d of April, and cut their way through the Turkish camp;
while those who were too feeble to attempt an escape assembled
in a large mill that was used as a powder-magazine, and blew
themselves and many of the incoming Turks to atoms.

Some fifteen years after the death of Marco Bozzaris, the American
traveller and author, Mr. John L. Stephens, visited Greece, and,
at Missolonghi, was presented to Constantine Bozzaris and the
widow and children of his deceased brother. In the account which
the author gives of this interview, in his Incidents of Travel
in Greece, he describes Constantine Bozzaris, then a colonel
in the service of King Otho, as a man of about fifty years of
age, of middle height and spare build, who, immediately after
the formal introduction, expressed his gratitude as a Greek for
the services rendered his country by America; and added, "with
sparkling eye and flushed cheek, that when the Greek revolutionary
flag sailed into the port of Napoli di Romania, among hundreds
of vessels of all nations, an American captain was the first
to recognize and salute it." Mr. Stephens thus describes the
widow of the Greek hero: "She was under forty, tall and stately
in person, and habited in deep black. She looked the widow of
a hero; as one worthy of those Grecian mothers who gave their
hair for bow-strings and their girdles for sword-belts, and,
while their heartstrings were cracking, sent their husbands to
fight and perish for their country. Perhaps it was she who led
Marco Bozzaris from the wild guerilla warfare in which he had
passed his early life, and fired him with the high and holy
ambition of freeing his country. I am certain that no man could
look her in the face without finding his wavering purposes fixed,
and without treading more firmly in the path of high and honorable
ambition."

Mr. Stephens closes the account of his interview with the widow
and family as follows: "At parting I told them that the name of
Marco Bozzaris was as familiar in America as that of a hero of
our own Revolution, and that it had been hallowed by the
inspiration of an American poet. I added that, if it would not
be unacceptable, on my return to my native country I would send
the tribute referred to, as an evidence of the feeling existing
in America toward the memory of Marco Bozzaris." The promised
tribute was the following Beautiful and stirring poem by
FITZ-GREENE HALLECK:

Marco Bozzaris.

At midnight, in his guarded tent,
The Turk was dreaming of the hour
When Greece, her knee in suppliance bent,
Should tremble at his power:
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.

At midnight, in the forest shades,
Bozzaris ranged his Suliote band,
True as the steel of their tried blades,
Heroes in heart and hand.
There had the Persian's thousands stood,
There had the glad earth drunk their blood
On old Plataea's day;
And now there breathed that haunted air
The sons of sires who conquered there,
With arm to strike, and soul to dare,
As quick, as far as they.

An hour passed on--the Turk awoke;
That bright dream was his last;
He woke to hear his sentries shriek
"To arms! they come! the Greek! the Greek!"
He woke, to die 'mid flame and smoke,
And shout, and groan, and sabre-stroke,
And death-shots falling thick and fast
As lightnings from the mountain-cloud,
And heard, with voice as trumpet loud,
Bozzaris cheer his band:
"Strike! till the last armed foe expires;
Strike! for your altars and your fires;
Strike! for the green graves of your sires,
God, and your native land!"

They fought like brave men, long and well;
They piled that ground with Moslem slain;
They conquered; but Bozzaris fell,
Bleeding at every vein.
His few surviving comrades saw
His smile when rang their proud hurrah,
And the red field was won,
Then saw in death his eyelids close,
Calmly as to a night's repose--
Like flowers at set of sun.

Come to the bridal chamber, Death!
Come to the mother, 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.

But to the hero, when his sword
Has won the battle for the free,
Thy voice sounds like a prophet's word,
And in its hollow tones are heard
Thanks of millions yet to be.
Come, when his task of fame is wrought;
Come, with her laurel-leaf, blood-bought;
Come, in her crowning hour--and then
Thy sunken eye's unearthly light
To him is welcome as the sight
Of sky and stars to prisoned men;
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 Haytien seas.

Bozzaris! with the storied brave
Greece nurtured in her glory's time,
Rest thee--there is no prouder grave,
Even in her own proud clime.
She wore no funeral weeds for thee,
Nor bade the dark hearse wave its plume,
Like torn branch from death's leafless tree,
In sorrow's pomp and pageantry,
The heartless luxury of the tomb;
But she remembers thee as one
Long loved, and for a season gone:
For thee her poet's lyre is wreathed,
Her marble wrought, her music breathed;
For thee she rings the birthday bells;
Of thee her babes' first lisping tells;
For thine her evening prayer is said
At palace couch and cottage bed;
Her soldier, closing with the foe,
Gives for thy sake a deadlier blow;
His plighted maiden, when she fears
For him, the joy of her young years,
Thinks of thy fate and checks her tears.
And she, the mother of thy boys,
Though in her eye and faded cheek
Is read the grief she will not speak,
The memory of her buried joys,
And even she who gave thee birth,
Will, by their pilgrim-circled hearth,
Talk of thy doom without a sigh:
For thou art Freedom's now, and Fame's--
One of the few, the immortal names
That were not born to die!

About the time of the exploit of Bozzaris, Lord Byron arrived
in Greece, to take an active part in aid of Greek independence,
and proceeded to Missolonghi in January, 1824. No warmer friend
of the Greeks than Byron ever lived; but while he sympathized
with, and was anxious to aid in every way possible, those who,
in his own words, "suffered all the moral and physical ills that
could afflict humanity," it was evidently his honest belief that
the only salvation for Greece lay in her becoming a British
dependency. In his notes to Childe Harold, penned before the
revolution broke out, but while all Greece was ablaze with the
desire for liberty, he wrote as follows: "The Greeks will never
be independent; they will never be sovereigns, as heretofore,
and God forbid they ever should! but they may be subjects without
being slaves. Our colonies are not independent, but they are
free and industrious, and such may Greece be hereafter." These
words show that he considered Greece incapable of self-government,
should she ever regain her liberty; and he therefore deprecated
a return to her ancient sovereignty. That this was his view,
and that he subsequently designed to give it effect in his own
person, we are assured from the well-founded belief, derived
from his own declarations, that when he joined the Greek cause
he had a mind to place himself at its head, hoping and perhaps
believing that he might become King of Hellas, under the protection
of Great Britain. But whatever his plans may have been, they were
cut short by his death, at Missolonghi, on the 19th of April
following his arrival there.

INTERFERENCE OF THE GREAT POWERS.

In the campaign of 1824, while the Greeks lost Candia and the
strongly fortified rocky isle of Ip'sara, a Turkish fleet was
repulsed off Samos, and a large Egyptian fleet, sent to attack
the Morea, was frustrated in all its designs. The campaign of
1825, however, was opened by the landing, in the Morea, of a
large Egyptian army, under Ibrahim Paesha, son of the Viceroy
of Egypt. Navari'no soon fell into his power; and at the time
of the fall of Missolonghi, in the following year, be was in
possession of most of southern Greece, and many of the islands
of the Archipelago. The foundation of an Egyptian military and
slave-holding state now seemed to be laid in Europe; and this
danger, combined with the noble defence and sufferings at
Missolonghi and elsewhere, attracted the serious attention of
the European governments and people; numerous philanthropic
societies were formed to aid the Greeks, and finally three of
the great European powers were moved to interfere in their behalf.
On the 6th of July, 1827, a treaty was concluded at London between
England, Russia, and France, stipulating that the Greeks should
govern themselves, but that they should pay tribute to the Porte.

To enforce this treaty a combined English, French, and Russian
squadron sailed to the Grecian Archipelago; but the Turkish Sultan
haughtily rejected the intervention of the three powers, and
the troops of Ibrahim Pasha continued their devastations in the
Morea. On the 20th of October the allied squadron, under the
command of the English admiral, Edward Codrington, entered the
harbor of Navarino, where the Turkish-Egyptian fleet lay at anchor;
and a sanguinary naval battle followed, in which the allies nearly
destroyed the fleet of the enemy. Although this action was spoken
of by the British government as an "untoward event," Admiral
Codrington was rewarded both by England and Russia; and the poet
CAMPBELL, in the following lines on the battle, naturally praises
him for planning and striking this decisive blow for Grecian liberty:

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