Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
Italy: Vols. XI–XIII. 1876–79.
Soracte
By Lord Byron (1788–1824)O
The infant Alps, which—had I not before
Gazed on their mightier parents, where the pine
Sits on more shaggy summits, and where roar
The thundering lauwine—might be worshipped more;
But I have seen the soaring Jungfrau rear
Her never-trodden snow, and seen the hoar
Glaciers of bleak Mont Blanc both far and near,
And in Chimari heard the thunder-hills of fear,
And on Parnassus seen the eagles fly
Like spirits of the spot, as ’t were for fame,
For still they soared unutterably high:
I ’ve looked on Ida with a Trojan’s eye;
Athos, Olympus,—Ætna, Atlas, made
These hills seem things of lesser dignity,
All, save the lone Soracte’s height, displayed
Not now in snow, which asks the lyric Roman’s aid.
Heaves like a long-swept wave about to break,
And on the curl hangs pausing: not in vain
May he, who will, his recollections rake
And quote in classic raptures, and awake
The hills with Latian echoes; I abhorred
Too much to conquer for the poet’s sake
The drilled dull lesson, forced down word by word
In my repugnant youth, with pleasure to record
My sickening memory; and though time hath taught
My mind to meditate what then it learned,
Yet such the fixed inveteracy wrought
By the impatience of my early thought,
That, with the freshness wearing out before
My mind could relish what it might have sought,
If free to choose, I cannot now restore
Its health; but what it then detested, still abhor.
Not for thy faults, but mine: it is a curse
To understand, not feel thy lyric flow,
To comprehend, but never love thy verse:
Although no deeper moralist rehearse
Our little life, nor bard prescribe his art,
Nor livelier satirist the conscience pierce,
Awakening without wounding the touched heart,
Yet fare thee well,—upon Soracte’s ridge we part.