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Corfu
THOU pleasant island, whose rich garden-shores | |
| Have had a long-lived fame of loveliness, | |
| Recorded in the historic song, that framed | |
| The unknown poet of an unknown time, | |
| Illustrating his native Ithaca, | 5 |
| And all her bright society of isles,— | |
| Most pleasant land! To us, who journeying come | |
| From the far west, and fall upon thy charms, | |
| Our earliest welcome to Ionian seas, | |
| Thou art a wonder and a deep delight, | 10 |
| Thy usual habitants can never know. | |
| Thou art a portal, whence the Orient, | |
| The long-desired, long-dreamt-of Orient, | |
| Opens upon us, with its stranger forms, | |
| Outlines immense and gleaming distances, | 15 |
| And all the circumstance of fairyland. | |
| Not only with a present happiness, | |
| But taking from anticipated joys | |
| An added sense of actual bliss, we stand | |
| Upon thy cliffs, or tread the slopes that leave | 20 |
| No interval of shingle, rock, or sand, | |
| Between their verdure and the ocean’s brow,— | |
| Whose olive-groves (unlike the darkling growth, | |
| That earns on western shores the traveller’s scorn) | |
| Can wear the gray that on their foliage lies, | 25 |
| As but the natural hoar of lengthened days,— | |
| Making, with their thick-bossed and fissured trunks, | |
| Bases far-spread and branches serpentine, | |
| Sylvan cathedrals, such as in old times | |
| Gave the first life to Gothic art, and led | 30 |
| Imagination so sublime a way. | |
| Then forth advancing, to our novice eyes | |
| How beautiful appears the concourse clad | |
| In that which, of all garbs, may best befit | |
| The grace and dignity of manly form: | 35 |
| The bright red open vest, falling upon | |
| The white thick-folded kirtle, and low cap | |
Above the high-shorn brow.
Nor less than these, | |
| With earnest joy, and not injurious pride, | |
| We recognize of Britain and her force | 40 |
| The wonted ensigns and far-known array; | |
| And feel how now the everlasting sea, | |
| Leaving his old and once imperious spouse, | |
| To faint, in all the beauty of her tears, | |
| On the dank footsteps of a mouldering throne, | 45 |
| Has taken to himself another mate, | |
| Whom his uxorious passion has endowed, | |
| Not only with her ancient properties, | |
| But with all other gifts and privilege, | |
| Within the circle of his regal hand. | 50 |
| Now forward,—forward on a beaming path, | |
| But be each step as fair as hope has feigned it, | |
| For me, the memory of the little while, | |
| That here I rested happily, within | |
| The close-drawn pale of English sympathies, | 55 |
| Will bear the fruit of many an afterthought, | |
| Bright in the dubious track of after years. | |
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