The Project Gutenberg eBook of Poems on Travel, by R. M. Leonard.

Quick, painter, quick, the moment seize
Amid the snowy Pyrenees;
More evanescent than the snow,
The pictures come, are seen, and go:
Quick, quick, currente calamo.5
I do not ask the tints that fill
The gate of day 'twixt hill and hill;
I ask not for the hues that fleet
Above the distant peaks; my feet
Are on a poplar-bordered road,10
Where with a saddle and a load
A donkey, old and ashen-grey,
Reluctant works his dusty way.
Before him, still with might and main
Pulling his rope, the rustic rein,15
A girl: before both him and me,
Frequent she turns and lets me see,
Unconscious, lets me scan and trace
The sunny darkness of her face
And outlines full of southern grace.20
Following I notice, yet and yet,
Her olive skin, dark eyes deep set,
And black, and blacker e'en than jet,
The escaping hair that scantly showed,
Since o'er it in the country mode,25
For winter warmth and summer shade,
The lap of scarlet cloth is laid.
And then, back-falling from the head,
A crimson kerchief overspread
Her jacket blue; thence passing down,30
A skirt of darkest yellow-brown,
Coarse stuff, allowing to the view
The smooth limb to the woollen shoe.
But who—here's some one following too,—
A priest, and reading at his book!35
Read on, O priest, and do not look;
Consider,—she is but a child,—
Yet might your fancy be beguiled.
Read on, O priest, and pass and go!
But see, succeeding in a row,40
Two, three, and four, a motley train,
Musicians wandering back to Spain;
With fiddle and with tambourine,
A man with women following seen.
What dresses, ribbon ends, and flowers!45
And,—sight to wonder at for hours,—
The man,—to Phillip has he sat?—
With butterfly-like velvet hat;
One dame his big bassoon conveys,
On one his gentle arm he lays;50
They stop, and look, and something say,
And to 'España' ask the way.
But while I speak, and point them on;
Alas, my dearer friends are gone,
The dark-eyed maiden and the ass55
Have had the time the bridge to pass.
Vainly, beyond it far descried,
Adieu, and peace with you abide,
Grey donkey, and your beauteous guide.
The pictures come, the pictures go,60
Quick, quick, currente calamo.

CINTRA

Lo! Cintra's glorious Eden intervenes
In variegated maze of mount and glen.
Ah me! what hand can pencil guide, or pen,
To follow half on which the eye dilates
Through views more dazzling unto mortal ken5
Than those whereof such things the bard relates,
Who to the awe-struck world unlocked Elysium's gates?

The horrid crags, by toppling convent crown'd,
The cork-trees hoar that clothe the shaggy steep,
The mountain-moss by scorching skies imbrown'd,10
The sunken glen, whose sunless shrubs must weep,
The tender azure of the unruffled deep,
The orange tints that gild the greenest bough,
The torrents that from cliff to valley leap,
The vine on high, the willow branch below,15
Mix'd in one mighty scene, with varied beauty glow.

SWITZERLAND

In the steamy, stuffy Midlands, 'neath an English summer sky,
When the holidays are nearing with the closing of July,
And experienced Alpine stagers and impetuous recruits
Are renewing with the season their continual disputes—
Those inveterate disputes5
On the newest Alpine routes—
And inspecting the condition of their mountaineering boots:

You may stifle your reflections, you may banish them afar,
You may try to draw a solace from the thought of 'Nächstes Jahr'—
But your heart is with those climbers, and you'll feverishly yearn10
To be crossing of the Channel with your luggage labelled 'Bern',
Leaving England far astern
With a ticket through to Bern,
And regarding your profession with a lordly unconcern!

They will lie beside the torrent, just as you were wont to do,15
With the woodland green around them and a snow-field shining through:
They will tread the higher pastures, where celestial breezes blow,
While the valley lies in shadow and the peaks are all aglow—
Where the airs of heaven blow
'Twixt the pine woods and the snow,20
And the shades of evening deepen in the valley far below:

They will scale the mountain strongholds that in days of old you won,
They will plod behind a lantern ere the rising of the sun,
On a 'grat' or in a chimney, on the steep and dizzy slope,
For a foothold or a handhold they will diligently grope—
On the rocky, icy slope26
(Where we'll charitably hope
'Tis assistance only Moral that they're getting from a rope);

They will dine on mule and marmot, and on mutton made of goats,
They will face the various horrors of Helvetian table d'hotes:30
But whate'er the paths that lead them, and the food whereon they fare,
They will taste the joy of living, as you only taste it there,
As you taste it Only There
In the higher, purer air,
Unapproachable by worries and oblivious quite of care!35

Place me somewhere in the Valais, 'mid the mountains west of Binn,
West of Binn and east of Savoy, in a decent kind of inn,
With a peak or two for climbing, and a glacier to explore,—
Any mountains will content me, though they've all been climbed before—
Yes! I care not any more40
Though they've all been done before,
And the names they keep in bottles may be numbered by the score!

Though the hand of Time be heavy: though your ancient comrades fail:
Though the mountains you ascended be accessible by rail:44
Though your nerve begin to weaken, and you're gouty grown and fat,
And prefer to walk in places which are reasonably flat—
Though you grow so very fat
That you climb the Gorner Grat
Or perhaps the Little Scheideck,—and are rather proud of that:
Yet I hope that till you die50
You will annually sigh
For a vision of the Valais with the coming of July,
For the Oberland or Valais and the higher, purer air,
And the true delight of living, as you taste it only there!

ZERMATT CHURCHYARD

They warred with Nature, as of old with gods
The Titans; like the Titans too they fell,
Hurled from the summit of their hopes, and dashed
Sheer down precipitous tremendous crags,
A thousand deaths in one. 'Tis o'er, and we5
Who sit at home, and by the peaceful hearth
Read their sad tale, made wise by the event,
May moralize of folly and a thirst
For barren honour, fruitful of no end.
'Tis well: we were not what we are without10
That cautious wisdom, and the sober mind
Of prudence, steering calm 'twixt rock and storm.
Yet, too, methinks, we were not what we are
Without that other fiery element—
The love, the thirst for venture, and the scorn15
That aught should be too great for mortal powers
That yet one peak in all the skyey throng
Should rise unchallenged with unvanquished snows,
Virgin from the beginning of the world.
Such fire was theirs; O not for fame alone—20
That coarser thread in all the finer skein
That draws adventure, oft by vulgar minds
Deemed man's sole aim—but for the high delight
To tread untrodden solitudes, and feel
A sense of power, of fullest freedom, lost25
In the loud vale where Man is all in all.
For this they dared too much; nor they alone,
They but the foremost of an Alpine band,
Who in the life of cities pine and pant
For purer air, for peak, and pass, and glen,30
With slow majestic glacier, born to-day,
Yet with the trophies of a thousand years
On its scarred bosom, till its icy bonds
It burst, and rush a torrent to the main.
Such sons still hast thou, England; be thou proud
To have them, relics of thy younger age.36
Nor murmur if not all at once they take
The care and burden on them. Learn of them!
Youth has its teaching, too, as well as age:
We grow too old too soon; the flaxen head40
Of childhood apes experience' hoary crown,
And prudent lisps ungraceful aged saws.
'Tis so: yet here in Zermatt—here beneath
The fatal peak, beside the heaving mound
That bears the black cross with the golden names
Of men, our friends, upon it—here we fain46
Would preach a soberer lesson. Forth they went,
Fearless and gay as to a festival,
One clear, cold morn: they climbed the virgin height;
They stood where still the awestruck gazer's eye50
Shudders to follow. There a little while
They spake of home, that centre whose wide arms
Hold us where'er we are, in joy, or woe,
On earth, in air, and far on stormy seas.
Then they turned homeward, yet not to return.
It was a fearful place, and as they crept56
Fearfully down the giddy steep, there came
A slip—no more—one little slip, and down
Linked in a living avalanche they fell,
Brothers in hope, in triumph, and in death,60
Nor dying were divided. One remained
To tell their story, and to bury them.

ZERMATT

TO THE MATTERHORN
(June-July, 1897)

Thirty-two years since, up against the sun,
Seven shapes, thin atomies to lower sight,
Labouringly leapt and gained thy gabled height,
And four lives paid for what the seven had won.

They were the first by whom the deed was done,5
And when I look at thee, my mind takes flight
To that day's tragic feat of manly might,
As though, till then, of history thou hadst none.

Yet ages ere men topped thee, late and soon
Thou didst behold the planets lift and lower;10
Saw'st, maybe, Joshua's pausing sun and moon,
And the betokening sky when Caesar's power
Approached its bloody end; yea, even that Noon
When darkness filled the earth till the ninth hour.

NATURA MALIGNA

The Lady of the Hills with crimes untold
Followed my feet, with azure eyes of prey;
By glacier-brink she stood—by cataract-spray—
When mists were dire, or avalanche-echoes rolled.
At night she glimmered in the death-wind cold,5
And if a footprint shone at break of day,
My flesh would quail, but straight my soul would say:
''Tis hers whose hand God's mightier hand doth hold.'

I trod her snow-bridge, for the moon was bright,
Her icicle-arch across the sheer crevasse,10
When lo, she stood!... God made her let me pass,
Then felled the bridge!... Oh, there in sallow light
There down the chasm, I saw her cruel, white,
And all my wondrous days as in a glass.

NATURA BENIGNA

What power is this? what witchery wins my feet
To peaks so sheer they scorn the cloaking snow,
All silent as the emerald gulfs below,
Down whose ice-walls the wings of twilight beat?
What thrill of earth and heaven—most wild, most sweet—5
What answering pulse that all the senses know,
Comes leaping from the ruddy eastern glow
Where, far away, the skies and mountains meet?

Mother, 'tis I reborn: I know thee well:
That throb I know and all it prophesies,10
O Mother and Queen, beneath the olden spell
Of silence, gazing from thy hills and skies!
Dumb Mother, struggling with the years to tell
The secret at thy heart through helpless eyes!

THE SIMPLON PASS

——Brook and road
Were fellow-travellers in this gloomy Pass,
And with them did we journey several hours
At a slow step. The immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,5
The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
And in the narrow rent, at every turn,
Winds thwarting winds bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,10
Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds and region of the heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light—15
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree,
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.20

OBERMANN

In front the awful Alpine track
Crawls up its rocky stair;
The autumn storm-winds drive the rack
Close o'er it, in the air.

Behind are the abandoned baths5
Mute in their meadows lone;
The leaves are on the valley paths;
The mists are on the Rhone—

The white mists rolling like a sea.
I hear the torrents roar.10
—Yes, Obermann, all speaks of thee!
I feel thee near once more.

How often, where the slopes are green
On Jaman, hast thou sate
By some high chalet door, and seen15
The summer day grow late,

And darkness steal o'er the wet grass
With the pale crocus starred,
And reach that glimmering sheet of glass
Beneath the piny sward,20

Lake Leman's waters, far below:
And watched the rosy light
Fade from the distant peaks of snow:
And on the air of night

Heard accents of the eternal tongue25
Through the pine branches play:
Listened, and felt thyself grow young:
Listened, and wept——Away!

Away the dreams that but deceive!
And thou, sad Guide, adieu!30
I go; Fate drives me: but I leave
Half of my life with you.

Glion?——Ah, twenty years, it cuts
All meaning from a name!
White houses prank where once were huts!
Glion, but not the same,

And yet I know not. All unchanged5
The turf, the pines, the sky!
The hills in their old order ranged.
The lake, with Chillon by!

And 'neath those chestnut-trees, where stiff
And stony mounts the way,10
Their crackling husk-heaps burn, as if
I left them yesterday.

Across the valley, on that slope,
The huts of Avant shine—
Its pines under their branches ope15
Ways for the tinkling kine.

Full-foaming milk-pails, Alpine fare,
Sweet heaps of fresh-cut grass,
Invite to rest the traveller there
Before he climb the pass—20

The gentian-flowered pass, its crown
With yellow spires aflame,
Whence drops the path to Allière down
And walls where Byron came.

Still in my soul the voice I heard25
Of Obermann—away
I turned; by some vague impulse stirred,
Along the rocks of Naye

And Sonchaud's piny flanks I gaze
And the blanched summit bare30
Of Malatrait, to where in haze
The Valais opens fair,

And the domed Velan with his snows
Behind the upcrowding hills
Doth all the heavenly opening close35
Which the Rhone's murmur fills—

And glorious there, without a sound,
Across the glimmering lake,
High in the Valais depth profound,
I saw the morning break.40

THE TERRACE AT BERNE

Ten years!—and to my waking eye
Once more the roofs of Berne appear;
The rocky banks, the terrace high,
The stream—and do I linger here?

The clouds are on the Oberland,5
The Jungfrau snows look faint and far;
But bright are those green fields at hand,
And through those fields comes down the Aar,

And from the blue twin lakes it comes,
Flows by the town, the church-yard fair,10
And 'neath the garden-walk it hums,
The house—and is my Marguerite there?

NEVER, OH NEVER MORE

Never, oh never more shall I behold
A sunrise on the glacier:—stars of morn
Paling in primrose round the crystal horn;
Soft curves of crimson mellowing into gold4
O'er sapphire chasm, and silvery snow-field cold;
Fire that o'er-floods the horizon; beacons borne
From wind-worn peak to storm-swept peak forlorn;
Clear hallelujahs through heaven's arches rolled.

Never, oh never more these feet shall feel
The firm elastic tissue of upland turf,10
Or the crisp edge of the high rocks; or cling
Where the embattled cliffs beneath them reel
Through cloud-wreaths eddying like the Atlantic surf,
Far, far above the wheeling eagle's wing.

HAPPY IS ENGLAND

Happy is England! I could be content
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 languishment5
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,10
Enough their whitest arms in silence clinging:
Yet do I often warmly burn to see
Beauties of deeper glance, and hear their singing,
And float with them about the summer waters.

THE DAISY

WRITTEN AT EDINBURGH

O love, what hours were thine and mine,
In lands of palm and southern pine;
In lands of palm, of orange-blossom,
Of olive, aloe, and maize and vine.

What Roman strength Turbia showed5
In ruin, by the mountain road;
How like a gem, beneath, the city
Of little Monaco, basking, glowed.

How richly down the rocky dell
The torrent vineyard streaming fell10
To meet the sun and sunny waters,
That only heaved with a summer swell.

What slender campanili grew
By bays, the peacock's neck in hue;
Where, here and there, on sandy beaches15
A milky-belled amaryllis blew.

How young Columbus seemed to rove,
Yet present in his natal grove,
Now watching high on mountain cornice,
And steering, now, from a purple cove,20

Now pacing mute by ocean's rim;
Till, in a narrow street and dim,
I stayed the wheels at Cogoletto,
And drank, and loyally drank to him.

Nor knew we well what pleased us most,25
Not the clipt palm of which they boast;
But distant colour, happy hamlet,
A mouldered citadel on the coast,

Or tower, or high hill-convent, seen
A light amid its olives green;30
Or olive-hoary cape in ocean;
Or rosy blossom in hot ravine,

Where oleanders flushed the bed
Of silent torrents, gravel-spread;
And, crossing, oft we saw the glisten35
Of ice, far up on a mountain bead.

We loved that hall, tho' white and cold,
Those nichèd shapes of noble mould,
A princely people's awful princes,
The grave, severe Genovese of old.40

At Florence too what golden hours,
In those long galleries, were ours;
What drives about the fresh Cascinè,
Or walks in Boboli's ducal bowers.

In bright vignettes, and each complete,45
Of tower or duomo, sunny-sweet,
Or palace, how the city glittered,
Thro' cypress avenues, at our feet.

But when we crost the Lombard plain
Remember what a plague of rain;50
Of rain at Reggio, rain at Parma;
At Lodi, rain, Piacenza, rain.

And stern and sad (so rare the smiles
Of sunlight) looked the Lombard piles;
Porch-pillars on the lion resting,55
And sombre, old, colonnaded aisles.

O Milan, O the chanting quires,
The giant windows' blazoned fires,
The height, the space, the gloom, the glory!
A mount of marble, a hundred spires!60

I climbed the roofs at break of day;
Sun-smitten Alps before me lay.
I stood among the silent statues,
And statued pinnacles, mute as they.

How faintly-flushed, how phantom-fair,65
Was Monte Rosa, hanging there
A thousand shadowy-pencilled valleys
And snowy dells in a golden air.

Remember how we came at last
To Como; shower and storm and blast70
Had blown the lake beyond his limit,
And all was flooded; and how we past

From Como, when the light was grey,
And in my head, for half the day,
The rich Virgilian rustic measure75
Of Lari Maxume, all the way,

Like ballad-burthen music, kept,
As on The Lariano crept
To that fair port below the castle
Of Queen Theodolind, where we slept;80

Or hardly slept, but watched awake
A cypress in the moonlight shake,
The moonlight touching o'er a terrace
One tall Agavè above the lake.

What more? we took our last adieu,85
And up the snowy Splugen drew,
But ere we reached the highest summit
I plucked a daisy, I gave it you.

It told of England then to me,
And now it tells of Italy.90
O love, we two shall go no longer
To lands of summer across the sea;

So dear a life your arms enfold
Whose crying is a cry for gold:
Yet here to-night in this dark city,95
When ill and weary, alone and cold,

I found, though crushed to hard and dry,
This nurseling of another sky
Still in the little book you lent me,
And where you tenderly laid it by:100

And I forgot the clouded Forth,
The gloom that saddens Heaven and Earth,
The bitter east, the misty summer
And grey metropolis of the North.

Perchance, to lull the throbs of pain,105
Perchance, to charm a vacant brain,
Perchance, to dream you still beside me,
My fancy fled to the South again.

CADENABBIA

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 colonnade5
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,10
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,15
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.20

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,25
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,30
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 supreme35
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.40

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.

TO VERONA

Verona! thy tall gardens stand erect
Beckoning me upward. Let me rest awhile
Where the birds whistle hidden in the boughs,
Or fly away when idlers take their place,
Mated as well, concealed as willingly;5
Idlers whose nest must not swing there, but rise
Beneath a gleaming canopy of gold,
Amid the flight of Cupids, and the smiles
Of Venus ever radiant o'er their couch.
Here would I stay, here wander, slumber here,10
Nor pass into that theatre below
Crowded with their faint memories, shades of joy.
But ancient song arouses me: I hear
Coelius and Aufilena; I behold
Lesbia, and Lesbia's linnet at her lip15
Pecking the fruit that ripens and swells out
For him whose song the Graces loved the most,
Whatever land, east, west, they visited.
Even he must not detain me: one there is
Greater than he, of broader wing, of swoop20
Sublimer. Open now that humid arch
Where Juliet sleeps the quiet sleep of death,
And Romeo sinks aside her.
Fare ye well,
Lovers! Ye have not loved in vain: the hearts
Of millions throb around ye. This lone tomb,25
One greater than yon walls have ever seen,
Greater than Manto's prophet-eye foresaw
In her own child or Rome's, hath hallowèd;
And the last sod or stone a pilgrim knee29
Shall press (Love swears it, and swears true) is here.

THE APENNINE

Once more upon the woody Apennine,
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;5
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,

Th' Acroceraunian mountains of old name;10
And on Parnassus seen the eagles fly
Like spirits of the spot, as 'twere for fame,
For still they soared unutterably high:
I've looked on Ida with a Trojan's eye;
Athos, Olympus, Aetna, Atlas, made15
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

For our remembrance, and from out the plain
Heaves like a long-swept wave about to break,
And on the curl hangs pausing.21

CURRENTE CALAMO

CINTRA

SWITZERLAND

ZERMATT CHURCHYARD

ZERMATT

TO THE MATTERHORN
(June-July, 1897)

NATURA MALIGNA

NATURA BENIGNA

THE SIMPLON PASS

OBERMANN

THE TERRACE AT BERNE

NEVER, OH NEVER MORE

HAPPY IS ENGLAND

THE DAISY

WRITTEN AT EDINBURGH

CADENABBIA

LAKE OF COMO

TO VERONA

THE APENNINE

WHERE UPON APENNINE SLOPE

CURRENTE CALAMO

CINTRA

SWITZERLAND

ZERMATT CHURCHYARD

ZERMATT TO THE MATTERHORN (June-July, 1897)

NATURA MALIGNA

NATURA BENIGNA

THE SIMPLON PASS

OBERMANN

THE TERRACE AT BERNE

NEVER, OH NEVER MORE

HAPPY IS ENGLAND

THE DAISY WRITTEN AT EDINBURGH

CADENABBIA LAKE OF COMO

TO VERONA

THE APENNINE

WHERE UPON APENNINE SLOPE

ZERMATT

TO THE MATTERHORN
(June-July, 1897)

THE DAISY

WRITTEN AT EDINBURGH

CADENABBIA

LAKE OF COMO