Italy Sweet Too!

APPY is England! I could be content

HAP

To see no other verdure than its own;

To feel no other breezes than are blown Through its tall woods with high romances blent:

Yet do I sometimes feel a languishment
For skies Italian, and an inward groan
To sit upon an Alp as on a throne,

And half forget what world or worldling meant.

Happy is England, sweet her artless daughters;
Enough their simple loveliness for me,
Enough their whitest arms in silence
clinging:

Yet often do I warmly burn to see

Beauties of deeper glance, and hear them. singing

And float with them about the summer waters.

John Keats.

From Italy

IX

AMI in Italy? Is this the Mincius?

Are those the distant turrets of Verona? And shall I sup where Juliet at the Masque Saw her loved Montague, and now sleeps by him? Such questions hourly do I ask myself; And not a finger-post by the road-side

"To Mantua" "To Ferrara " - but excites

Surprise and doubt, and self-congratulation.

Cadenabbia

Samuel Rogers.

(Lake Como)

LAKE OF COMO

NO sound of wheels or hoof-beat breaks
The silence of the summer day,

As by the loveliest of all lakes

I while the idle hours away.

I pace the leafy colonnade

Where level branches of the plane
Above me weave a roof of shade,
Impervious to the sun and rain.

At times a sudden rush of air
Flutters the lazy leaves o'erhead,
And gleams of sunshine toss and flare
Like torches down the path I tread.

.

By Somariva's garden gate

I make the marble stairs my seat, And hear the water, as I wait,

Lapping the steps beneath my feet.

The undulation sinks and swells
Along the stony parapets,
And far away the floating bells
Tinkle upon the fisher's nets.

Silent and slow, by tower and town
The freighted barges come and go,
Their pendent shadows gliding down
By town and tower submerged below.

The hills sweep upward from the shore,
With villas scattered one by one
Upon their wooded spurs, and lower
Bellagio blazing in the sun.

And dimly seen, a tangled mass

Of walls and woods, of light and shade, Stands beckoning up the Stelvio Pass Varenna with its white cascade.

I ask myself, Is this a dream?
Will it all vanish into air?
Is there a land of such supreme
And perfect beauty anywhere?

Sweet vision! Do not fade away;
Linger until my heart shall take
Into itself the summer day,

And all the beauty of the lake.

Linger until upon my brain

Is stamped an image of the scene,
Then fade into the air again,

And be as if thou hadst not been.

From Como

I

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

LOVE to sail along the Larian Lake

Under the shore- though not to visit Pliny,
To catch him musing in his plane-tree walk,
Or fishing, as he might be, from his window
And, to deal plainly, (may his Shade forgive me!)
Could I recall the ages past, and play

The fool with Time, I should perhaps reserve
My leisure for Catullus on his Lake,
Though to fare worse, or Virgil at his farm
A little further on the way to Mantua.
But such things cannot be. So I sit still,
And let the boatman shift his little sail,
His sail so forkèd and so swallow-like,

Well pleased with all that comes. The morning air

Plays on my cheek how gently, flinging round

A silvery gleam: and now the purple mists