# Maud, and other poems/The Daisy

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 Turbìa show'd In ruin, by the mountain road; How like a gem, beneath, the city Of little Monaco, basking, glow'd.
​How richly down the rocky dell The torrent vineyard streaming fell 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 beaches A milky-bell'd amaryllis blew.
How young Columbus seem'd to rove, Yet present in his natal grove, Now watching high on mountain cornice, And steering, now, from a purple cove,
Now pacing mute by ocean's rim; Till, in a narrow street and dim, I stay'd the wheels at Cogoletto, And drank, and loyally drank to him.
​Nor knew we well what pleased us most, Not the clipt palm of which they boast; But distant colour, happy hamlet, A moulder'd citadel on the coast,
Or tower, or high hill-convent, seen A light amid its olives green; Or olive-hoary cape in ocean; Or rosy blossom in hot ravine,
Where oleanders flush'd the bed Of silent torrents, gravel-spread; And, crossing, oft we saw the glisten Of ice, far off on a mountain head.
We loved that hall, tho' white and cold, Those niched shapes of noble mould, A princely people's awful princes, The grave, severe Genovese of old.
​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, Of tower or duomo, sunny-sweet, Or palace, how the city glitter'd, Thro' cypress avenues, at our feet.
But when we crost the Lombard plain Remember what a plague of rain; Of rain at Reggio, at Parma; At Lodi, rain, Piacenza, rain.
And stern and sad (so rare the smiles Of sunlight) look'd the Lombard piles; Porch-pillars on the lion resting, And sombre, old, colonnaded aisles.
​O Milan, O the chanting quires, The giant windows' blazon'd fires, The height, the space, the gloom, the glory! A mount of marble, a hundred spires!
I climb'd 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-flush'd, how phantom-fair, Was Monte Rosa, hanging there A thousand shadowy-pencill'd valleys And snowy dells in a golden air.
Remember how we came at last To Como; shower and storm and blast Had blown the lake beyond his limit, And all was flooded; and how we past
​From Como, when the light was gray, And in my head, for half the day, The rich Virgilian rustic measure 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;
Or hardly slept, but watch'd 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, And up the snowy Splugen drew, But ere we reach'd the highest summit I pluck'd a daisy, I gave it you.
​It told of England then to me, And now it tells of Italy. O love, we two shall go no longer To lands of summer beyond the sea;
So dear a life your arms enfold Whose crying is a cry for gold: Yet here to-night in this dark city, When ill and weary, alone and cold,
I found, tho' crush'd to hard and dry, This nurseling of another sky Still in the little book you lent me, And where you tenderly laid it by:
And I forgot the clouded Forth, The gloom that saddens Heaven and Earth, The bitter east, the misty summer And gray metropolis of the North.
​Perchance, to lull the throbs of pain, Perchance, to charm a vacant brain, Perchance, to dream you still beside me, My fancy fled to the South again.