O Milan, O the chanting quires,
The giant windows' blazoned fires,
The height, the space, the gloom, the glory!
A mount of marble, a hundred spires!60
I climbed the roofs at break of day;
Sun-smitten Alps before me lay.
I stood among the silent statues,
And statued pinnacles, mute as they.
How faintly-flushed, how phantom-fair,65
Was Monte Rosa, hanging there
A thousand shadowy-pencilled valleys
And snowy dells in a golden air.
Remember how we came at last
To Como; shower and storm and blast70
Had blown the lake beyond his limit,
And all was flooded; and how we past
From Como, when the light was grey,
And in my head, for half the day,
The rich Virgilian rustic measure75
Of Lari Maxume, all the way,
Like ballad-burthen music, kept,
As on The Lariano crept
To that fair port below the castle
Of Queen Theodolind, where we slept;80
Or hardly slept, but watched awake
A cypress in the moonlight shake,
The moonlight touching o'er a terrace
One tall Agavè above the lake.
What more? we took our last adieu,85
And up the snowy Splugen drew,
But ere we reached the highest summit
I plucked a daisy, I gave it you.
It told of England then to me,
And now it tells of Italy.90
O love, we two shall go no longer
To lands of summer across the sea;
So dear a life your arms enfold
Whose crying is a cry for gold:
Yet here to-night in this dark city,95
When ill and weary, alone and cold,