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;
Sun-smitten Alps before me lay.

I stood among the silent statues,
And statued pinnacles, mute as they.

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
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 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