LORD BYRON ON LEAVING NEWSTEAD ABBEY / (One of the poet’s earliest productions.) / 1803 / Why dost thou build the hall? Son of the winged days! Thou lookest / from thy tower to-day; yet a few years, and the blast of the desert / comes; it howls in thy empty court. / OSSIAN

Through thy battlements, Newstad, the hollow winds whistle; / Thou, the hall of my Fathers, art gone to decay; / In thy once smiling garden, the hemlock an thistle / Have choekd up the rose, whcih late bloom’d in the way.…

Lord Byron