giant element
From rock to rock leaps with delirious bound,
Crushing the cliffs, which downward, worn and rent
With his fierce footsteps, yields in chasms a fearful rent....
Horribly beautiful! but, on the verge
From side to side, beneath the glittering morn,
An Iris sits amidst the infernal surge,
Like Hope upon a deathbed.

The 'enormous skeleton' of Rome impresses him most by moonlight:

When the rising moon begins to climb
Its topmost arch, and gently pauses there;
When the stars twinkle through the loops of time,
And the low night breeze waves along the air!

Underlying all his varying moods is this note:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

The sea, the sky with its stars and clouds, and the mountains, are
his passion:

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean--roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin--his control
Stops with the shore; upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,
When, for a moment, like a drop of rain
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown.
(_Childe Harold_.)

The day at last has broken. What a night
Hath usher'd it! How beautiful in heaven!
Though varied with a transitory storm,
More beautiful in that variety!...
And can the sun so rise,
So bright, so rolling back the clouds into
Vapours more lovely than the unclouded sky,
With golden pinnacles and snowy mountains,
And billows purpler than the ocean's, making
In heaven a glorious mockery of the earth.
(_Sardanapalus.)_

He had loved the Scotch Highlands in youth:

Amidst Nature's native scenes,
Loved to the last, whatever intervenes
Between us and our childhood's sympathy
Which still reverts to what first caught the eye.
He who first met the Highlands' swelling blue
Will love each peak that shews a kindred hue,
Hail in each crag a friend's familiar face,
And clas