8]
Grazes--the purest God of gentle waters!
And most serene of aspect, and most clear;
Surely that stream was unprofaned by slaughters--
A mirror and a bath for Beauty's youngest daughters!

LXVII.

And on thy happy shore a Temple[449] still,
Of small and delicate proportion, keeps
Upon a mild declivity of hill,[nd]
Its memory of thee; beneath it sweeps
Thy current's calmness; oft from out it leaps
The finny darter with the glittering scales,[450]
Who dwells and revels in thy glassy deeps;
While, chance, some scattered water-lily sails[ne]
Down where the shallower wave still tells its bubbling tales.

LXVIII.

Pass not unblest the Genius of the place!
If through the air a Zephyr more serene
Win to the brow, 'tis his; and if ye trace
Along his margin a more eloquent green,
If on the heart the freshness of the scene
Sprinkle its coolness, and from the dry dust
Of weary life a moment lave it clean
With Nature's baptism,--'tis to him ye must
Pay orisons for this suspension of disgust.[451]

LXIX.

The roar of waters!--from the headlong height
Velino cleaves the wave-worn precipice;
The fall of waters! rapid as the light
The flashing mass foams shaking the abyss;
The Hell of Waters! where they howl and hiss,
And boil in endless torture; while the sweat
Of their great agony, wrung out from this
Their Phlegethon, curls round the rocks of jet
That gird the gulf around, in pitiless horror set,

LXX.

And mounts in spray the skies, and thence again
Returns in an unceasing shower, which round,
With its unemptied cloud of gentle rain,
Is an eternal April to the ground,
Making it all one emerald:--how profound[nf]
The gulf! and how the Giant Element
From rock to rock leaps with delirious bound,[ng]
Crushing the cliffs, which, downward worn and rent
With his fierce footsteps, yield in chasms a fearful vent

LXXI.

To the broad column which rolls on, and shows
More like the fountain of an infant sea
Torn from the womb of mountains by the throes
Of a new world, than only thus to be
Parent of rivers, which flow gushingly,