Written at Edinburgh
Published 1855. Written Aug. 1853 (Mem. i 364; Mat. ii 85). T. says it was written to his wife Emily, remembering their Italian tour of 1851: ‘In a metre which I invented, representing in some measure the grandest of metres, the Horatian Alcaic.’ T. was to modify the stanza for other epistolary poems, To the Rev. F. D. Maurice (p. 505) and To Professor Jebb (III 162), and still further for To the Master of Balliol (III 219).
O love, what hours were thine and mine,
In lands of palm and southern pine;
In lands of palm, of orange-blossom,
Of olive, aloe, and maize and vine.
What Roman strength Turbia showed
In ruin, by the mountain road;
How like a gem, beneath, the city
Of little Monaco, basking, glowed.
How richly down the rocky dell
The torrent vineyard streaming fell
To meet the sun and sunny waters,
That only heaved with a summer swell.
By bays, the peacock’s neck in hue;
Where, here and there, on sandy beaches
A milky-belled amaryllis blew.
How young Columbus seemed to rove,
Yet present in his natal grove,
Now watching high on mountain cornice,
And steering, now, from a purple cove,
Now pacing mute by ocean’s rim;
Till, in a narrow street and dim,
I stayed the wheels at Cogoletto,
And drank, and loyally drank to him.
Nor knew we well what pleased us most,
Not the clipt palm of which they boast;
But distant colour, happy hamlet,
A mouldered citadel on the coast,
Or tower, or high hill-convent, seen
A light amid its olives green;
Or olive-hoary cape in ocean;
Or rosy blossom in hot ravine,
Where oleanders flushed the bed
Of silent torrents, gravel-spread;
And, crossing, oft we saw the glisten
Of ice, far up on a mountain head.
We loved that hall, though white and cold,
Those nichèd shapes of noble mould,
A princely people’s awful princes,
The grave, severe Genovese of old.
At Florence too what golden hours,
In those long galleries, were ours;
What drives about the fresh Cascinè,
Or walks in Boboli’s ducal bowers.
In bright vignettes, and each complete,
Of tower or duomo, sunny-sweet,
Or palace, how the city glittered,
Through cypress avenues, at our feet.
But when we crost the Lombard plain
Remember what a plague of rain;
Of rain at Reggio, rain at Parma;
At Lodi, rain, Piacenza, rain.
And stern and sad (so rare the smiles
Of sunlight) looked the Lombard piles;
Porch-pillars on the lion resting,
And sombre, old, colonnaded aisles.
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!
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,
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 blast
Had blown the lake beyond his limit,
And all was flooded; and how we past
From Como, when the light was gray,
And in my head, for half the day,
The rich Virgilian rustic measure
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;
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,
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.
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 tonight in this dark city,
When ill and weary, alone and cold,
I found, though crushed to hard and dry,
This nurseling of another sky
Still in the little book you lent me,
And where you tenderly laid it by:
And I forgot the clouded Forth,
The gloom that saddens Heaven and Earth,
The bitter east, the misty summer
And gray metropolis of the North.
Perchance, to lull the throbs of pain,
Perchance, to charm a vacant brain,
Perchance, to dream you still beside me,
My fancy fled to the South again.
¶311. 8. Mónaco.
13. campanili: bell-towers.
14. T. in Cornwall, 8 June 1848: ‘sea purple and green like a peacock’s neck’ (Mem. i 275).
36. up] 1856; off 1855.
37. ‘The Palazzo Ducale’ (T.).
43. ‘The Park of Florence’ (T.).
51. Reggio, rain] 1856; Reggio 1855.
57. Mílan.
60–62. Cp. The Palace of Art 82, 1832 text: ‘Below sunsmitten icy spires’.
75–6. Virgil, Georgics ii 159–60: Anne lacus tantos? te, Lari maxime, teque/fluctibus et fremitu adsurgens, Benace, marino? (‘Or of our mighty lakes? Of thee, Larius, our greatest; and thee, Benacus, with the roaring, surging swell of the sea?’) Lake Como was the Lacus Larius of the Romans.
79. ‘Varenna’ (T.).
80. Theodolind: wife of a sixth-century king of the Lombards.
84. Agavè: a handsome tropical plant.
93. H.T. was born Aug. 1852.
98. Shelley, The Cloud 74: ‘the nursling of the Sky’.