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(From Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage)
ONCE more upon the woody Apennine, | |
| The infant Alps, which—had I not before | |
| Gazed on their mightier parents, where the pine | |
| Sits on more shaggy summits, and where roar | |
| The thundering lauwine—might be worshipped more; | 5 |
| But I have seen the soaring Jungfrau rear | |
| Her never-trodden snow, and seen the hoar | |
| Glaciers of bleak Mont Blanc both far and near, | |
| And in Chimari heard the thunder-hills of fear, | |
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| The Acroceraunian mountains of old name; | 10 |
| And on Parnassus seen the eagles fly | |
| Like spirits of the spot, as ’t were for fame, | |
| For still they soared unutterably high: | |
| I ’ve looked on Ida with a Trojan’s eye; | |
| Athos, Olympus,—Ætna, Atlas, made | 15 |
| These hills seem things of lesser dignity, | |
| All, save the lone Soracte’s height, displayed | |
| Not now in snow, which asks the lyric Roman’s aid. | |
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| For our remembrance, and from out the plain | |
| Heaves like a long-swept wave about to break, | 20 |
| And on the curl hangs pausing: not in vain | |
| May he, who will, his recollections rake | |
| And quote in classic raptures, and awake | |
| The hills with Latian echoes; I abhorred | |
| Too much to conquer for the poet’s sake | 25 |
| The drilled dull lesson, forced down word by word | |
| In my repugnant youth, with pleasure to record | |
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| Aught that recalls the daily drug which turned | |
| My sickening memory; and though time hath taught | |
| My mind to meditate what then it learned, | 30 |
| Yet such the fixed inveteracy wrought | |
| By the impatience of my early thought, | |
| That, with the freshness wearing out before | |
| My mind could relish what it might have sought, | |
| If free to choose, I cannot now restore | 35 |
| Its health; but what it then detested, still abhor. | |
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| Then farewell, Horace; whom I hated so, | |
| Not for thy faults, but mine: it is a curse | |
| To understand, not feel thy lyric flow, | |
| To comprehend, but never love thy verse: | 40 |
| Although no deeper moralist rehearse | |
| Our little life, nor bard prescribe his art, | |
| Nor livelier satirist the conscience pierce, | |
| Awakening without wounding the touched heart, | |
| Yet fare thee well,—upon Soracte’s ridge we part. | 45 |
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