LVI.

By Coblentz, on a rise of gentle ground,
There is a small and simple pyramid,
Crowning the summit of the verdant mound:
Beneath its base are hero's ashes hid,

Our enemy's, but let not that forbid

Honour to Marceau! o'er whose early tomb

Tears, big tears, gush'd from the rough soldier's lid, Lamenting and yet envying such a doom,

Falling for France, whose rights he battled to resume.

LVII.

Brief, brave, and glorious was his young career,-
His mourners were two hosts, his friends and foes;
And fitly may the stranger lingering here
Pray for his gallant spirit's bright repose;
For he was Freedom's champion, one of those,
The few in number, who had not o'erstept
The charter to chastise which she bestows

On such as wield her weapons: he had kept

The whiteness of his soul, and thus men o'er him wept.12

Here Ehrenbreitstein,

LVIII.

with her shatter'd wall,

Black with the miner's blast, upon her height Yet shows of what she was, when shell and ball Rebounding idly on her strength did light; A tower of victory! from whence the flight Of baffled foes was watch'd along the plain: But peace destroy'd what war could never blight, And laid those proud roofs bare to summer's rain— On which the iron shower for years had pour'd in vain.

LIX.

Adieu to thee, fair Rhine! How long delighted

The stranger fain would linger on his

way!

Thine is a scene alike where souls united
Or lonely contemplation thus might stray:
And could the ceaseless vultures cease to prey
On self-condemning bosoms, it were here,
Where nature, nor too. sombre nor too gay,
Wild but not rude, awful yet not austere,
Is to the mellow earth as autumn to the year.

LX.

Adieu to thee again! a vain adieu !

There can be no farewell to scene like thine;
The mind is colour'd by thy every

And if reluctantly the eyes resign

hue;

Their cherish'd gaze upon thee, lovely Rhine!
"T is with the thankful glance of parting praise;
More mighty spots may rise-more glaring shine,
But none unite in one attaching maze

The brilliant, fair, and soft-the glories of old days:

LXI.

The negligently grand, the fruitful bloom
Of coming ripeness, the white city's sheen,
The rolling stream, the precipice's gloom,
The forest's growth, and Gothic walls between,
The wild rocks shaped as they had turrets been,
In mockery of man's art; and these withal

A race of faces happy as the scene,

Whose fertile bounties here extend to all,

Still springing o'er thy banks, though empires near them fall.

LXII.

But these recede. Above me are the Alps,
The palaces of nature, whose vast walls
Have pinnacled in clouds their snowy scalps,
And throned eternity in icy halls
Of cold sublimity, where forms and falls
The avalanche-the thunderbolt of snow!

All that expands the spirit, yet appals,
Gather around these summits, as to show

How earth may pierce to heaven, yet leave vain man below.

LXIII.

But ere these matchless heights I dare to scan,
There is a spot should not be pass'd in vain,—
Morat! the proud, the patriot field! where man
May gaze on ghastly trophies of the slain,
Nor blush for those who conquer'd on that plain;
Here Burgundy bequeath'd his tombless host,
A bony heap, through ages to remain,
Themselves their monument ;—the Stygian coast

Unsepulchred they roam'd, and shriek'd each wandering ghost. 14

LXIV.

While Waterloo with Canna's carnage vies,
Morat and Marathon twin names shall stand;
They were true glory's stainless victories,
Won by the unambitious heart and hand
Of a proud, brotherly, and civic band,
All unbought champions in no princely cause
Of vice-entail'd corruption; they no land
Doom'd to bewail the blasphemy of laws
Making kings' rights divine, by some Draconic clause.

LXV.

By a lone wall a lonelier column rears
A grey and grief-worn aspect of old days;
'T is the last remnant of the wreck of years,
And looks as with the wild bewilder'd gaze
Of one to stone converted by amaze,

Yet still with consciousness; and there it stands,
Making a marvel that it not decays,

When the coeval pride of human hands,

Levell❜d Aventicum, 15 hath strew'd her subject lands.

LXVI.

-gave

And there-oh! sweet and sacred be the name!-
Julia-the daughter, the devoted-g
Her youth to Heaven; her heart, beneath a claim
Nearest to Heaven's, broke o'er a father's grave.
Justice is sworn 'gainst tears, and hers would crave
The life she lived in; but the judge was just,
And then she died on him she could not save.

Their tomb was simple, and without a bust,

And held within their urn one mind, one heart, one dust.16

LXVII.

But these are deeds which should not pass away,

And names that must not wither, though the earth

Forgets her empires with a just decay,

The enslavers and the enslaved, their death and birth;

The high, the mountain-majesty of worth

Should be, and shall, survivor of its woe,

And from its immortality look forth
In the sun's face, like yonder Alpine snow,'
Imperishably pure beyond all things below.

17

LXVIII.

Lake Leman woos me with its crystal face,
The mirror where the stars and mountains view
The stillness of their aspect, in each trace

Its clear depth yields of their far height and hue :
There is too much of man here, to look through
With a fit mind the might which I behold;
But soon in me shall loneliness renew

Thoughts hid, but not less cherish'd than of old,
Ere mingling with the herd had penn'd me in their fold.

LXIX.

To fly from, need not be to hate, mankind;

All are not fit with them to stir and toil,

Nor is it discontent to keep the mind
Deep in its fountain, lest it overboil

In the hot throng, where we become the spoil
Of our infection, till too late and long

We may deplore and struggle with the coil,

In wretched interchange of wrong for wrong,

'Midst a contentious world, striving where none are strong.

LXX.

There, in a moment, we may plunge our years

In fatal penitence, and in the blight

Of our own soul, turn all our blood to tears,
And colour things to come with hues of night;
The race of life becomes a hopeless flight

To those that walk in darkness: on the sea,
The boldest steer but where their ports invite,

But there are wanderers o'er eternity,

Whose bark drives on and on, and anchor`d ne'er shall be.

LXXI.

Is it not better, then, to be alone,

And love earth only for its earthly sake?
By the blue rushing of the arrowy Rhone,18
Or the pure bosom of its nursing lake,
Which feeds it as a mother who doth make
A fair but froward infant her own care,

Kissing its cries away as these awake ;-
Is it not better thus our lives to wear,

Than join the crushing crowd, doom'd to inflict or bear?

LXXII.

I live not in myself, but I become

Portion of that around me; and to me

High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities tortures: I can see
Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be
A link reluctant in a fleshly chain,

Class'd among creatures, when the soul can flee,
And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain
Of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain.

LXXIII.

And thus I am absorb'd, and this is life:
I look upon the peopled desert past

As on a place of agony and strife,
Where, for some sin, to sorrow I was cast,
To act and suffer, but remount at last
With a fresh pinion; which I feel to spring,

Though young, yet waxing vigorous as the blast
Which it would cope with, on delighted wing,
Spurning the clay-cold bonds which round our being cling.

LXXIV.

And when, at length, the mind shall be all free

From what it hates in this degraded form,

Reft of its carnal life, save what shall be
Existent happier in the fly and worm,-
When elements to elements conform,
And dust is as it should be, shall I not
Feel all. I see, less dazzling, but more warm?
The bodiless thought? the spirit of each spot,
Of which, even now, I share at times the immortal lot?

LXXV.

Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a part

Of me and of my soul, as I of them?

Is not the love of these deep in my heart

With a pure passion? should I not contemn
All objects, if compared with these? and stem

A tide of suffering, rather than forego
Such feelings for the hard and worldly phlegm
Of those whose eyes are only turn'd below,

Gazing upon the ground, with thoughts which dare not glow?