LI

The wanderer came for quiet, to forget
The blighted hope, the inexpiable wrong,
To soften here in solitude regret
Of a love stamped immortal in his song,
That but for him had lain the dead among.
Vain essay! Wouldst thou memories conceal,
Or forms or thoughts that to the past belong,
If the heart's wounds corroding thou wouldst heal,
That solitude thou seek'st to thee shall all reveal,

LII

Making the past one present; odours bear
Vibrations thrilling along memory's chain,
Felt in the chords of being till they wear
Its pulse away; so did he feel how vain
To realise his boyhood's hope again;
Till, the last refuge from self-tyranny,
He flew from nature's ever-populous reign
Back to the desert of humanity,
To bear hate, scorn, repulse, to madden, and to die.

LIII

It is the night, the sacred hour of night;
How eloquent darkness opens to the eye
The unknown, the undying, and the infinite;
The heaven of heavens, revealing silently
The star-roofed temple of eternity,
There, where in floating argentry are hung
The living wilderness of galaxy,
On the black void, foam-like from ocean, flung,
That solemn sea of air whose stillness hath a tongue.

LIV

And the hushed slumbrous earth, the breathless trees,
The watching hills that nearer round us close;
The stars that to the eye are melodies,
Stilling the bosom in divine repose;
All enter there, till being overflows
With love and adoration, till it swells
A part of the eternal life that glows
In all things; that through time, death, motion dwells,
Whose pulse each blade of grass, each world revolving tells.

LV

If thou wouldst see great Morning from the deep
Rise bounding forth as when to birth she sprung,
Stand thou where, hanging from the mountain-steep,
Her breast with vines and myrtle-groves o'erhung,
Round her grey sides the misty vapours flung
Like incense from the altar of the sea,
Rises to heaven the sunlit clouds among,
The towering Amalfi! Once did she
Europe and Asia join, key-stone of liberty.

LVI

Now on her shore the matron sits alone
With solitude; go, seek her grot remote,
Where beauty rests as on her visible throne:
The murmuring waves, the low cicala's note
Shall lull thy listening ear, vine-tendrils wrought
In latticed net-work round thee weave their wreath
Of leaves, through whose dim veil the waters float,
Afar expanding like the azure breath
Of heaven descended there, that fills the void beneath.

LVII

Or, wouldst thou seek profounder solitudes,
Rest where La Cava's silver-sounding bell
Startles the traveller musing 'mid her woods;
Who would not here with Contemplation dwell,
As with an angel in its earthly cell?
And while the minister's organ-notes along
Stole, mingling with the water's wilder swell,
How grateful, pausing o'er that solemn song,
To feel shut out, forgot, the world's forgetting throng.

LVIII

Lo, far on the horizon's verge reclined,
A Temple rising like a broken throne:
The sun's red rays in lurid light enshrined
'Mid clouds that mutter forth a thunder-tone,
Gleam athwart each airial column shown
Like giants standing 'gainst a sable sky.
What record tells it in that desert lone?
Resting in solitary majesty,
Eternal Paestum there absorbs the heart and eye.

LIX

Pause here! the desolate waste, the lowering heaven,
The sea-fowl's clang, the grey mist hurrying by,
The Altar fronting with its brow unriven,
In isolation of sublimity,
Mates with the clouds, the mountains, and the sky;
But the sea breaks no more against his shrine,
Hurled from his base the Ocean-deity:
His worshippers have passed and left no sign,
The shaker of the earth no more is held divine!

LX

There, like some Titan throned in his retreat
Of deserts, the declining sun's last rays
Falling round him on his majestic seat,
Each limb dilated in the twilight haze
Of the red distance darkening on the gaze,
It rises in august tranquillity;
A presence that unconscious power betrays,
Whose co-mates are the hills, the rocks, and sea:
Even so, the awe-struck soul reposing dwells on thee!