One visit brief I made again In autumn next but one, and then All better found. With Mary Gwen I talked, a schoolgirl just about To leave this winter and come out. Patty and Lydia were away, And a strange sort of distance lay Betwixt me and Emilia. She sought me less, and I was shy. And yet this time I think that I More subtly felt, more saw, more knew The beauty into which she grew; More understood the meanings now Of the still eyes and rounded brow, And could, perhaps, have told you how The intellect that crowns our race To more than beauty in her face Was changed. But I confuse from hence The later and the earlier sense. IV Have you the Giesbach seen? a fall In Switzerland you say, that’s all; That, and an inn, from which proceeds A path that to the Faulhorn leads, From whence you see the world of snows. Few see how perfect in repose, White green, the lake lies deeply set, Where, slowly purifying yet, The icy river-floods retain A something of the glacier stain. Steep cliffs arise the waters o’er, The Giesbach leads you to a shore, And to one still sequestered bay I found elsewhere a scrambling way. Above, the loftier heights ascend, And level platforms here extend The mountains and the cliffs between, With firs and grassy spaces green, And little dips and knolls to show In part or whole the lake below; And all exactly at the height To make the pictures exquisite. Most exquisite they seemed to me, When, a year after my degree, Passing upon my journey home From Greece, and Sicily, and Rome, I stayed at that minute hotel Six days, or eight, I cannot tell. Twelve months had led me fairly through The old world surviving in the new. From Rome with joy I passed to Greece, To Athens and the Peloponnese; Saluted with supreme delight The Parthenon-surmounted height; In huts at Delphi made abode, And in Arcadian valleys rode; Counted the towns that lie like slain Upon the wide Bœotian plain; With wonder in the spacious gloom Stood of the Mycenæan tomb; From the Acrocorinth watched the day Light the eastern and the western bay. Constantinople then had seen, Where, by her cypresses, the queen Of the East sees flow through portals wide The steady streaming Scythian tide; And after, from Scamander’s mouth, Went up to Troy, and to the South, To Lycia, Caria, pressed, atwhiles Outvoyaging to Egean isles. To see the things, which, sick with doubt And comment, one had learnt about, Was like clear morning after night, Or raising of the blind to sight. Aware it might be first and last, I did it eagerly and fast, And took unsparingly my fill. The impetus of travel still Urged me, but laden, half oppress’d, Here lighting on a place of rest, I yielded, asked not if ’twere best. Pleasant it was, reposing here, To sum the experience of the year, And let the accumulated gain