The morn is up again, the dewy morn With breath all incense, and with cheek all bloom, Laughing the clouds away with playful scorn, And living as if earth contained no tomb. In Clarens: Clarens! sweet Clarens, birthplace of deep Love, Thine air is the young breath of passionate thought, Thy trees take root in Love; the snows above The very glaciers have his colours caught, And sunset into rose-hues sees them wrought By rays which sleep there lovingly; the rocks, The permanent crags, tell here of Love. Yet Ever and anon of griefs subdued There comes a token like a scorpion's sting, Scarce seen, but with fresh bitterness imbued; And slight withal may be the things which bring Back on the heart the weight which it would fling Aside for ever; it may be a sound, A tone of music, summer's eve or spring, A flower, the wind, the ocean, which shall wound, Striking the electric chain with which we are darkly bound. The unrest and torment of his own heart he finds reflected in Nature: The roar of waters! from the headlong height Velino cleaves the wave-worn precipice; The fall of waters! rapid as the light The flashing mass foams, shaking the abyss; The hell of waters! where they howl and hiss, And boil in endless torture; while the sweat Of their great agony, wrung out from this Their Phlegethon, curls round the rocks of jet That gird the gulf around, in pitiless horror set, And mounts in spray the skies, and thence again Returns in an unceasing shower, which round With its unemptied cloud of gentle rain Is an eternal April to the ground, Making it all one emerald; how profound The gulf, and how the giant element From rock to rock leaps with delirious bound, Crushing the cliffs, which downward, worn and rent With his fierce footsteps, yields in chasms a fearful rent.... Horribly beautiful! but, on the verge From side to side, beneath the glittering morn, An Iris sits amidst the infernal surge, Like Hope upon a deathbed. The 'enormous skeleton' of Rome impresses him most by moonlight: When the rising moon begins to climb Its topmost arch, and gently pauses there; When the stars twinkle through the loops of time, And the low night breeze waves along the air! Underlying all his varying moods is this note: There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but Nature more, From these our interviews, in which I steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the Universe and feel What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal. The sea, the sky with its stars and clouds, and the mountains, are his passion: