All overgrown with reeds and long rank grasses, And hillocks heaped of moss-inwoven turf, And where the huge and speckled aloe made, Rooted in stones, a broad and pointed shade,

XV.

He housed himself. There is a point of strand Near Vado's tower and town; and on one

side

The treacherous marsh divides it from the land,
Shadowed by pine and ilex forests wide,
And on the other creeps eternally,

Through muddy weeds, the shallow sullen sea.

XVI.

Here the earth's breath is pestilence, and few But things whose nature is at war with lifeSnakes and ill worms- -endure its mortal dew. The trophies of the clime's victorious strifeWhite bones, and locks of dun and yellow hair, And ringed horns which buffaloes did wear

And at the utmost point [of land?] stood there The relics of a weed-inwoven cot,

Thatched with broad flags. An outlawed murderer

Had lived seven days there: the pursuit was

hot

When he was cold. The birds that were his

grave

Fell dead upon their feast in Vado's wave.

XVIII.

There must have lived within Marenghi's heart

That fire, more warm and bright than life or

hope,

(Which to the martyr makes his dungeon
More joyous than the heaven's majestic cope
To his oppressor,) warring with decay,-
Or he could ne'er have lived years, day by day.

XIX.

Nor was his state so lone as you might think. He had tamed every newt and snake and

toad,

And every seagull which sailed down to drink Those [marshes ?] ere the death-mist went abroad.

And each one, with peculiar talk and play,
Wiled, not untaught, his silent time away.

XX.

And the marsh-meteors, like tame beasts, at

night

Came licking with blue tongues his veinèd feet;

And he would watch them, as, like spirits bright, In many entangled figures quaint and sweet To some enchanted music they would danceUntil they vanished at the first moon-glance.

XXI.

He mocked the stars by grouping on each weed
The summer dewdrops in the golden dawn;
And, ere the hoar-frost vanished, he could read
Its pictured footprints, as on spots of lawn
Its delicate brief touch in silence weaves
The likeness of the wood's remembered leaves.

XXII.

And many a fresh Spring-morn would he

awaken

While yet the unrisen sun made glow, like iron

Quivering in crimson fire, the peaks unshaken Of mountains and blue isles which did environ With air-clad crags that plain of land and sea,And feel liberty.

XXIII.

And in the moonless nights, when the dim ocean Heaved underneath the heaven,

Starting from dreams . . .

Communed with the immeasurable world; And felt his life beyond his limbs dilated, Till his mind grew like that it contemplated.

XXIV.

His food was the wild fig and strawberry; The milky pine-nuts which the autumnal blast

Shakes into the tall grass; and such small fry

As from the sea by winter-storms are cast; And the coarse bulbs of iris-flowers he found Knotted in clumps under the spongy ground.

XXV.

And so were kindled powers and thoughts which made

His solitude less dark. When memory came (For years gone by leave each a deepening shade),

His spirit basked in its internal flame,— As, when the black storm hurries round at night, The fisher basks beside his red firelight.

XXVI.

Yet human hopes and cares and faiths and

errors,

Like billows unawakened by the wind, Slept in Marenghi still; but that all terrors,

And, when he saw beneath the sunset's planet A black ship walk over the crimson ocean,Its pennons streaming in the blasts that fan it, Its sails and ropes all tense and without motion,

Like the dark ghost of the unburied even,Striding across the orange-coloured heaven,

XXVIII.

The thought of his own kind who made the soul Which sped that winged shape through night and day,

The thought of his own country