e;
And bridges span the stream with arches wide,
Their stony 'butments mossed and gray with years;
An undulating range of vales, and bowers,
And columned palaces, and distant towers,
And on the welkin mountains bar the view,
Shooting their jagged peaks sublimely up the blue!

IV.

I saunter up the walks;
My sandals wetted through
With dripping flowers and stalks,
That line the avenue;
My broidered mantle all bedabbled with the dew!
I climb a flight of steps with regal pride,
And stroll along an echoing colonnade,
Sweeping against its pillared balustrade,
Adown a porch, and through a portal wide,
And I am in my Castle, Lord of all;
My faithful groom is standing in the hall
To doff my shining robe, while servitors,
And cringing chamberlains beside the doors
Waving their gilded wands, obsequious wait,
And bow me on my way in royal pomp and state!

V.

My chamber lies apart,
The Castle's very heart,
And all things rich and rare,
From land, and sea, and air,
Are lavished with a wild and waste profusion there!
The carpeting was woven in Turkish looms,
From softest wool of fine Circassian sheep;
Tufted like springy moss in forests deep,
Illuminate with all its autumn blooms;
The antique chairs are made of cedar trees,
Veined with the rings of vanished cennturies
And touched with winter's frost, and summer's sun;
Sofas and couches, stuffed with cygnet's fleece,
Loll round inviting dreaminess and ease;
The gorgeous window curtains, damask red,
Suspended, silver-ringed, on bars of gold,
Droop heavily, in many a fluted fold,
And, rounding outward, intercept, and shed
The prisoned daylight o'er the slumbrous room,
In streams of rosy dimness, purple gloom;
Hard by are cabinets of curious shells,
Twisted and jointed, horned, wreathed, and curled,
And some like moons in rosy mist impearled,
With coral boughs from ocean's deepest cells;
Cases of rare medallions, coins antique,
Found in the dust of cities, Roman, Greek;
Etruscan urns, transparent, soft, and bright,
With fawns and dancing shepherds on their sides;
And costly marble vases dug from night
In Pompeii, beneath its lava tides