And the whole earth would henceforth be
A wider prison unto me:[1]
No child—no sire—no kin had I,
No partner in my misery;
I thought of this, and I was glad,
For thought of them had made me mad;
But I was curious to ascend
To my barred windows, and to bend
Once more, upon the mountains high,330
The quiet of a loving eye.[2]
XIII.
I saw them—and they were the same,
They were not changed like me in frame;
I saw their thousand years of snow
On high—their wide long lake below,[3]
And the blue Rhone in fullest flow;[4]
I heard the torrents leap and gush
O'er channelled rock and broken bush;
I saw the white-walled distant town,[5]
And whiter sails go skimming down;340
- ↑ [Compare—
"He sighed, and turned his eyes, because he knew
'Twas but a larger jail he had in view."Dryden, Palamon and Arcite, bk. i. lines 216, 217.Compare, too—
"An exile——
Who has the whole world for a dungeon strong."Prophecy of Dante, iv. 131, 132.] - ↑ [Compare—
"The harvest of a quiet eye."
A Poet's Epitaph, line 51, Works of W. Wordsworth, 1889, p. 116.] - ↑
I saw them with their lake below,
And their three thousand years of snow.—[MS.] - ↑ [This, according to Ruskin's canon, may be a poetical inaccuracy. The Rhone is blue below the lake at Geneva, but "les embouchures" at Villeneuve are muddy and discoloured.]
- ↑ [Villeneuve.]
- ↑ Between the entrances of the Rhone and Villeneuve, not far from Chillon, is a very small island [Ile de Paix]; the only one I could perceive in my voyage round and over the lake, within its circumference. It contains a few trees (I think not above three), and from its singleness and diminutive size has a peculiar effect upon the view.
