‘A landscape of the mind …’ (© Photograph by Paul Kohl)
Contemplating the ruins of Famagusta William Hurrell Mallock observed how “The landscape of the mind, against which our thoughts and expectations move, when the wind of the imagination is active, changes as quickly as the clouds; and indeed it consists often of several landscapes, semi-transparent and showing through one another.”1
…
Thus saith the Lord: “In whom shall Cyprus trust,
With all her crimes, her luxury, and pride?
In her voluptuous loves will she confide,
Her harlot-daughters, and her queen of lust?
My day is come when o’er her neck in dust
Vengeance and fury shall triumphant ride,
Death and captivity the spoil divide,
And Cyprus perish: I the Lord am just.
Then he that bought, and he that sold in thee,
Thy princely merchants, shall their loss deplore,
Brothers in ruin as in fraud before;
And thou, who madest thy rampart of the sea,
Less by thy foes cast down than crushed by me!
Thou, Famagusta! fall, and rise no more.”2
James Montgomery, 1820
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1
William Hurrell Mallock, In an enchanted island (London, 1892), p. 260.
2
James Montgomery, The poetical works of James Montgomery. Vol. 1. (London, 1820). Available
at Nineteenth Century Collections Online.