IN going back I walked part of the way, taking in inverse order Byron’s route, which is interesting because he worked his reminiscences of it into “Manfred.” This is what Byron says, and it shows how poems crystallize: “The music of the cows’ bells (for their wealth, like the Patriarchs’, is cattle) in the pastures (which reach to a height far above any mountains in Britain) and the shepherds, shouting to us from crag to crag, and playing on their reeds where the steeps appeared almost inaccessible, with the surrounding scenery, realized all that I ever heard or imagined of a pastoral existence—much more so than Greece or Asia Minor, for there we are a little too much of the saber and musquet order; and if there is a crook in one hand, you are sure to see a gun in the other—but this was pure and unmixed—solitary, savage and patriarchal: the effect I cannot describe. As we went, they played the ‘Ranz des Vaches’ and other airs by way of farewell.”
“THE MUSIC OF THE COWS’ BELLS.”
The pipes of the shepherds he later introduced into “Manfred:”
“Hark! the note,
The natural music of the mountain reed—
For here the patriarchal days are not
A pastoral fable—pipes in the liberal air,
Mix with the sweet bells of the sauntering herd.”