From his balcony Mont Blanc and its snowy aiguilles were screened, but the sun sank roseate behind the Jura, and it lifted again over vineyarded hills which echoed the songs of vine-dressers and the mellow bells of sauntering herds. Below, boats swept idly in the sun, or the long lances of the rain marched and marshalled across the level lake to the meeting and sundering of the clouds.
There came a time too soon, when the dulled nerves awoke, when the whole man cried out. In the sharpest of these moods Gordon found respite at the adjacent cottage, where Shelley, whose bright eyes seemed to drink light from the pages of Plato or Calderon, read aloud, or Jane Clermont, piquant and daring as of old, sang for them some song of Tom Moore’s. Or in the long days the two men walked and sailed, under a sky of garter-blue, feeling the lapping of the waves, living between the two wondrous worlds of water and ether, till for a time Gordon laid the troubled specters of his thoughts in semi-forgetfulness.
One day they drove along the margin of the lake to Chillon and spent a night beneath the frowning château walls that had entombed Bonnivard. On the afternoon of their return, sitting alone on the balcony with the gloom of those dungeons still upon him, gazing far across the lake, across the mountains, toward that home from which he had been driven, Gordon, for the first time since he had left England, found relief in composition. He wrote of Chillon’s prisoner, but the agony in the lines was a personal one:
“I made a tooting in the wall,
It was not therefrom to escape,
For I had buried one and all
Who loved me in a human shape;
No child—no sire—no kin had I,
No partner in my misery;
But I was curious to ascend