| |
| I STOOD beside Varese’s Lake, | |
| Mid that redundant growth | |
| Of vines and maize and bower and brake | |
| Which Nature, kind to sloth, | |
| And scarce solicited by human toil, | 5 |
| Pours from the riches of the teeming soil. | |
| |
| A mossy softness distance lent | |
| To each divergent hill, | |
| One crept away looking back as it went, | |
| The rest lay round and still; | 10 |
| The westering sun not dazzling now, though bright, | |
| Shed o’er the mellow land a molten light. | |
| |
| And, sauntering up a circling cove, | |
| I found upon the strand | |
| A shallop, and a girl who strove | 15 |
| To drag it to dry land: | |
| I stood to see the girl look round; her face | |
| Had all her country’s clear and definite grace. | |
| |
| She rested with the air of rest | |
| So seldom seen, of those | 20 |
| Whose toil remitted gives a zest, | |
| Not languor, to repose. | |
| Her form was poised yet buoyant, firm though free, | |
| And liberal of her bright black eyes was she. | |
| |
| Her hue reflected back the skies | 25 |
| Which reddened in the west; | |
| And joy was laughing in her eyes | |
| And bounding in her breast, | |
| Its rights and grants exulting to proclaim | |
| Where pride had no inheritance, nor shame. * * * * * | 30 |
| Methought this scene before mine eyes, | |
| Still glowing with yon sun, | |
| Which seemed to melt the myriad dyes | |
| Of heaven and earth to one, | |
| A divers unity,—methought this scene, | 35 |
| These undulant hills, the woods that intervene, | |
| |
| The multiplicity of growth, | |
| The cornfield and the brake, | |
| The trellised vines that cover both, | |
| The purple-bosomed lake, | 40 |
| Some fifty summers hence may all be found | |
| Rich in the charms wherewith they now abound. | |
| |
| And should I take my staff again, | |
| And should I journey here, | |
| My steps may be less steady then, | 45 |
| My eyesight not so clear, | |
| And from the mind the sense of beauty may, | |
| Even as these bodily gifts, have passed away; | |
| |
| But grant my age but eyes to see, | |
| A still susceptive mind, | 50 |
| All that leaves us, and all that we | |
| Leave wilfully behind, | |
| And nothing here would want the charms it wore | |
| Save only she who stands upon the shore. | |
| |
