Once more upon the mountains high
The quiet of a loving eye."
I stood, and mused, and dreamed, as my companions passed on, and suddenly started to find myself alone in that terrible place, and, with a shudder, I hurried after the voices, leaving the gloomy dungeon behind me; after which the white-curtained, quiet room of the Hotel Byron seemed a very palace, and the beautiful view of lovely lake and lofty mountain a picture that lent additional charm to liberty and freedom.
Is it to be wondered at that so many people quote Byron at this place? For it is his poetry that has given such a peculiar and nameless charm to it, that if one has a spark of poetic fire in his composition, and sits out amid the flowers and trees, of a pleasant afternoon, looking at the blue lake, the distant, white-walled town, the little isle, with its three trees, that the prisoner saw from his dungeon, and even sees the eagle riding on the blast, up towards the great Jura range,—Jura, that answered,—
"through her misty shroud,
Back to the joyous Alps, that call on her aloud,"—
and follows up his thought by reading part of the third canto of Childe Harold, in which Lake Leman and a thunder storm in the Alps are described, he feels very much like repeating it aloud.
Not having Childe Harold to read, I found relief in quoting those passages that everybody knows, and doing the following bit of inspiration upon the spot:—
Dreams of my youth, my boyhood's castles fair,