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PRINCE HENRY. THIS is the highest point. Two ways the rivers | |
| Leap down to different seas, and as they roll | |
| Grow deep and still, and their majestic presence | |
| Becomes a benefaction to the towns | |
| They visit, wandering silently among them, | 5 |
| Like patriarchs old among their shining tents. | |
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ELSIE. How bleak and bare it is! Nothing but mosses | |
Grow on these rocks.
PRINCE HENRY. Yet are they not forgotten; | |
| Beneficent Nature sends the mists to feed them. | |
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ELSIE. See yonder little cloud, that, borne aloft | 10 |
| So tenderly by the wind, floats fast away | |
| Over the snowy peaks! It seems to me | |
| The body of St. Catherine, borne by angels! | |
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PRINCE HENRY. Thou art St. Catherine, and invisible angels | |
| Bear thee across these chasms and precipices, | 15 |
| Lest thou shouldst dash thy feet against a stone! | |
| |
ELSIE. Would I were borne unto my grave, as she was, | |
| Upon angelic shoulders! Even now | |
| I seem uplifted by them, light as air! | |
What sound is that?
PRINCE HENRY. The tumbling avalanches! | 20 |
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ELSIE. How awful, yet how beautiful!
PRINCE HENRY. These are | |
| The voices of the mountains! Thus they ope | |
| Their snowy lips, and speak unto each other, | |
| In the primeval language, lost to man. | |
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ELSIE. What land is this that spreads itself beneath us? | 25 |
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PRINCE HENRY. Italy! Italy!
ELSIE. Land of the Madonna | |
| How beautiful it is! It seems a garden | |
Of Paradise!
PRINCE HENRY. Nay, of Gethsemane | |
| To thee and me, of passion and of prayer! | |
| Yet once of Paradise. Long years ago | 30 |
| I wandered as a youth among its bowers | |
| And never from my heart has faded quite | |
| Its memory, that, like a summer sunset, | |
| Encircles with a ring of purple light | |
All the horizon of my youth.
GUIDE. O friends! | 35 |
| The days are short, the way before us long; | |
| We must not linger, if we think to reach | |
| The inn at Belinzona before vespers! They pass on. | |
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