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 glitter'd, Thro' cypress avenues, at our feet. But when we crost the Lombard plain Remember what a plague of rain; Of rain at Reggio, at Parma; At Lodi, rain, Piacenza, rain. And stern and sad (so rare the smiles Of sunlight) look'd the Lombard piles ; Porch-pillars on the lion resting, And sombre, old, colonnaded aisles. O Milan, O the chanting quires, The giant windows' blazon'd fires, The height, the space, the gloom, the glory! A mount of marble, a hundred spires! I climb'd the roofs at break of day; I stood among the silent statues, How faintly-flush'd, how phantom-fair, Was Monte Rosa, hanging there A thousand shadowy-pencill'd valleys And snowy dells in a golden air. Remember how we came at last To Como; shower and storm and blast 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 watch'd 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 reach'd the highest summit I pluck'd a daisy, I gave it you. It told of England then to me, O love, we two shall go no longer So dear a life your arms enfold Yet here to-night in this dark city, I found, tho' crush'd to hard and dry, 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. |