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,
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 to-night in this dark city,
When ill and weary, alone and cold,

I found, tho' crush'd 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.

TO THE REV. F. D. MAURICE.

COME, when no graver cares employ,
God-father, come and see your boy :

Your presence will be sun in winter,

Making the little one leap for joy

For, being of that honest few,

Who give the Fiend himself his due,

Should eighty-thousand college-councils Thunder 'Anathema,' friend, at you;

M

Should all our churchmen foam in spite

At you, so careful of the right,

Yet one lay-hearth would give you welcome

(Take it and come) to the Isle of Wight;

Where, far from noise and smoke of town,

I watch the twilight falling brown

All round a careless-order'd garden

Close to the ridge of a noble down.

You'll have no scandal while you dine,
But honest talk and wholesome wine,
And only hear the magpie gossip
Garrulous under a roof of pine:

For groves of pine on either hand,
To break the blast of winter, stand;
And further on, the hoary Channel

Tumbles a breaker on chalk and sand;