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

I found, tho' crush'd to hard and dry, This nursling 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 grey 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.

ALFRED TENNYSON.

ITALY

OUR Italy's

The darling of the earth, the treasury, piled
With reveries of gentle ladies, flung

Aside, like ravelled silk, from life's worn stuff,-
With coins of scholars' fancy, which, being

rung

On workday counter, still sound silver-proof,—
In short, with all the dreams of dreamers young,
Before their heads have time for slipping off

Hope's pillow to the ground. How oft, indeed, We all have sent our souls out from the north,

On bare white feet which would not print nor bleed,

To climb the Alpine passes and look forth,

Where the low murmuring Lombard rivers lead

Their bee-like way to gardens almost worth
The sight which thou and I see afterward
From Tuscan Bellosguardo, wide awake,
When standing on the actual, blessed sward
Where Galileo stood at nights to take

The vision of the stars, we find it hard,
Gazing upon the earth and heaven, to make
A choice of beauty.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

TO ITALY

Stanzas from the "Italian Rhapsody."

ABSENCE from thee is such as men endure

Between the glad betrothal and the bride; Or like the years that Youth, intense and sure, From his ambition to his goal must bide. And if no more I may

Oh, then were Memory meant for those to whom is Hope denied.

Show me a lover who hath drunk by night
Thy beauty-potion, as the grape the dew:
"T were little wonder he were poet too,
With wine of song in unexpected might,

While moonlit cloister calls

With plashy fountain-falls,

Or darkened Arno moves to music with its mirrored light.

Who can withstand thee? What distress or care But yields to Naples, or that long day-dream We know as Venice, where alone more fair

Noon is than night; where every lapping stream Woos with a soft caress

Our new-world weariness,

And every ripple smiles with joy at sight of scene

so rare.

The mystery of thy charm-ah, who hath guessed?

"T were ne'er divined by day or shown in sleep; Yet sometimes Music, floating from her steep, Holds to our lips a chalice brimmed and blest: Then know we that thou art

Of the Ideal part

Of Man's one thirst that is not quenched, drink he howe'er so deep.

Thou human-hearted land, whose revels hold
Man in communion with the antique days,
And summon him from prosy greed to ways
Where Youth is beckoning to the Age of Gold;