HAPPY IS ENGLAND
Happy is England! I could be content
To see no other verdure than its own;
To feel no other breezes than are blown
Through its tall woods with high romances blent:
Yet do I sometimes feel a languishment5
For skies Italian, and an inward groan
To sit upon an Alp as on a throne,
And half forget what world or worldling meant.
Happy is England, sweet her artless daughters;
Enough their simple loveliness for me,10
Enough their whitest arms in silence clinging:
Yet do I often warmly burn to see
Beauties of deeper glance, and hear their singing,
And float with them about the summer waters.
J. Keats.
THE DAISY
WRITTEN AT EDINBURGH
O love, what hours were thine and mine,
In lands of palm and southern pine;
In lands of palm, of orange-blossom,
Of olive, aloe, and maize and vine.
What Roman strength Turbia showed5
In ruin, by the mountain road;
How like a gem, beneath, the city
Of little Monaco, basking, glowed.
How richly down the rocky dell
The torrent vineyard streaming fell10
To meet the sun and sunny waters,
That only heaved with a summer swell.
What slender campanili grew
By bays, the peacock's neck in hue;
Where, here and there, on sandy beaches15
A milky-belled amaryllis blew.
How young Columbus seemed to rove,
Yet present in his natal grove,
Now watching high on mountain cornice,
And steering, now, from a purple cove,20
Now pacing mute by ocean's rim;
Till, in a narrow street and dim,
I stayed the wheels at Cogoletto,
And drank, and loyally drank to him.
Nor knew we well what pleased us most,25
Not the clipt palm of which they boast;
But distant colour, happy hamlet,
A mouldered citadel on the coast,
Or tower, or high hill-convent, seen
A light amid its olives green;30
Or olive-hoary cape in ocean;
Or rosy blossom in hot ravine,
Where oleanders flushed the bed
Of silent torrents, gravel-spread;
And, crossing, oft we saw the glisten35
Of ice, far up on a mountain bead.
We loved that hall, tho' white and cold,
Those nichèd shapes of noble mould,
A princely people's awful princes,
The grave, severe Genovese of old.40
At Florence too what golden hours,
In those long galleries, were ours;
What drives about the fresh Cascinè,
Or walks in Boboli's ducal bowers.
In bright vignettes, and each complete,45
Of tower or duomo, sunny-sweet,
Or palace, how the city glittered,
Thro' cypress avenues, at our feet.
But when we crost the Lombard plain
Remember what a plague of rain;50
Of rain at Reggio, rain at Parma;
At Lodi, rain, Piacenza, rain.
And stern and sad (so rare the smiles
Of sunlight) looked the Lombard piles;
Porch-pillars on the lion resting,55
And sombre, old, colonnaded aisles.
O Milan, O the chanting quires,
The giant windows' blazoned fires,
The height, the space, the gloom, the glory!
A mount of marble, a hundred spires!60
I climbed the roofs at break of day;
Sun-smitten Alps before me lay.
I stood among the silent statues,
And statued pinnacles, mute as they.
How faintly-flushed, how phantom-fair,65
Was Monte Rosa, hanging there
A thousand shadowy-pencilled valleys
And snowy dells in a golden air.
Remember how we came at last
To Como; shower and storm and blast70
Had blown the lake beyond his limit,
And all was flooded; and how we past
From Como, when the light was grey,
And in my head, for half the day,
The rich Virgilian rustic measure75
Of Lari Maxume, all the way,
Like ballad-burthen music, kept,
As on The Lariano crept
To that fair port below the castle
Of Queen Theodolind, where we slept;80
Or hardly slept, but watched awake
A cypress in the moonlight shake,
The moonlight touching o'er a terrace
One tall Agavè above the lake.
What more? we took our last adieu,85
And up the snowy Splugen drew,
But ere we reached the highest summit
I plucked a daisy, I gave it you.
It told of England then to me,
And now it tells of Italy.90
O love, we two shall go no longer
To lands of summer across the sea;
So dear a life your arms enfold
Whose crying is a cry for gold:
Yet here to-night in this dark city,95
When ill and weary, alone and cold,
I found, though crushed to hard and dry,
This nurseling of another sky
Still in the little book you lent me,
And where you tenderly laid it by:100
And I forgot the clouded Forth,
The gloom that saddens Heaven and Earth,
The bitter east, the misty summer
And grey metropolis of the North.
Perchance, to lull the throbs of pain,105
Perchance, to charm a vacant brain,
Perchance, to dream you still beside me,
My fancy fled to the South again.
Lord Tennyson.
CADENABBIA
LAKE OF COMO
No sound of wheels or hoof-beat breaks
The silence of the summer day,
As by the loveliest of all lakes
I while the idle hours away.
I pace the leafy colonnade5
Where level branches of the plane
Above me weave a roof of shade
Impervious to the sun and rain.
At times a sudden rush of air
Flutters the lazy leaves o'erhead,10
And gleams of sunshine toss and flare
Like torches down the path I tread.
By Somariva's garden gate
I make the marble stairs my seat,
And hear the water, as I wait,15
Lapping the steps beneath my feet.
The undulation sinks and swells
Along the stony parapets,
And far away the floating bells
Tinkle upon the fisher's nets.20
Silent and slow, by tower and town
The freighted barges come and go,
Their pendent shadows gliding down
By town and tower submerged below.
The hills sweep upward from the shore,25
With villas scattered one by one
Upon their wooded spurs, and lower
Bellagio blazing in the sun.
And dimly seen, a tangled mass
Of walls and woods, of light and shade,30
Stands beckoning up the Stelvio Pass
Varenna with its white cascade.
I ask myself, Is this a dream?
Will it all vanish into air?
Is there a land of such supreme35
And perfect beauty anywhere?
Sweet vision! Do not fade away;
Linger until my heart shall take
Into itself the summer day,
And all the beauty of the lake.40
Linger until upon my brain
Is stamped an image of the scene,
Then fade into the air again,
And be as if thou hadst not been.
H. W. Longfellow.