"He who first met the Highland's swelling blue,
Will love each peak, that shows a kindred hue,
Hail in each crag a friend's familiar face,
And clasp the mountain in his mind's embrace."
The Island, Canto II. stanza xii. lines 9-12.
His "friends are mountains." He comes back to them as to a "holier land," where he may find not happiness, but peace.
Moore was inclined to attribute Byron's "love of mountain prospects" in his childhood to the "after-result of his imaginative recollections of that period," but (as Wilson, commenting on Moore, suggests) it is easier to believe that the "high instincts" of the "poetic child" did not wait for association to consecrate the vision (Life, p. 8).]
The earliest were the only paths for me.
The earliest were the paths and meant for me.—[MS. erased.]
Yet could I but expunge from out the book
Of my existence all that was entwined.—[MS. erased.]
My life has been too long—if in a day
I have survived——.—[MS. erased.]