At length the Christian knight slowly raised his head, and leaning on
his arm, sighed deeply. His face was very pale; but as he looked up,
and perceived the eagle in the heaven, a smile played upon his pallid
cheek, and his beautiful eye gleamed with a sudden flash of light.
"Glorious bird!" murmured the Christian warrior, "once I deemed that my
career might resemble thine! 'Tis over now and Greece, for which I
would have done so much, will soon forget my immemorial name. I have
stolen here to die in silence and in beauty. This blue air, and these
green woods, and these lone columns, which oft to me have been a
consolation, breathing of the poetic past, and of the days wherein I
fain had lived, I have escaped from the fell field of carnage to die
among them. Farewell my country! Farewell to one more beautiful than
Greece, farewell, Iduna!"
These were the last words of Nicaeus, Prince of Athens.
CHAPTER 22
While the unhappy lover of the daughter of Hunniades breathed his last
words to the solitary elements, his more fortunate friend received, in
the centre of his scene of triumph, the glorious congratulations of his
emancipated country.
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