‘waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ’s bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day.’
When that wind sweeps up the broad bed of the Arno, the yellowing canebrakes bend, the rushes thrill and tremble, the summer’s empty nests are shaken from the ilex and oak boughs, the great pines bend and tremble, the river, stirred by the breath of the sea, grows yellow and grey and swollen and turgid, the last swallow flies southward from his home under the eaves of granary or chapel, and the nightingales rise from their haunts in the thickets of laurel and bay and go also where the shadows of Indian temples or of Egyptian palm-trees lie upon the sands of a still older world.
In that most beautiful and too little known of poems, ‘Epipsychidion,’ the whole scene, though called Greek, is Italian, and might be taken from the woods beside the Lake of Garda, or the Sercchio which he knew so well, or the forest-like parks which lie deep and cool and still in the blue shadows of Appenine or Abruzzi.
‘There are thick woods where sylvan forms abide;
And many a fountain, rivulet and pond,