| |
(Excerpt)
IT was a dark autumnal day | |
| When first to Clisson I would stray; | |
| The groves were clad in brown and green, | |
| To suit the interval between | |
| The parting friend and coming foe | 5 |
| So sure to lay their beauties low. | |
| Thick hedge-rows, groves, and small rich fields, | |
| The region that surrounds it yields; | |
| Methought I spied at each brake pass | |
| The peasants risen in a mass, | 10 |
| Intrenched within the pathless wood, | |
| Where hostile legions were withstood | |
| By rustics all like heroes now, | |
| With sacred cause and holy vow. | |
| |
| But changed abruptly all I found, | 15 |
| Descending o’er a rugged ground; | |
| Until I reached a deep ravine, | |
| The Sèvre winding on between; | |
| When suddenly there raised its head, | |
| All spectral-like, quite causing dread, | 20 |
| The vast huge pile, so dark and hoary, | |
| Whose checkered fame aye lives in story, | |
| While stretched along and at its feet | |
| I saw the village winding street | |
| Far scattered up and down, and strange; | 25 |
| Just such as on some Alpine range | |
| Will lead you to the welcome spot | |
| Where soon fatigues are all forgot. | |
| |
| Long grass-grown steps cut o’er the rock | |
| Which shelves down in a mighty block | 30 |
| Conduct you to the portals grand | |
| Which green with ivy proudly stand. | |
| There now, within these crumbling walls, | |
| Lives recent Fame that pity calls, | |
| When standing o’er that fatal well | 35 |
| Down whose dark depths the victims fell, | |
| Who fought to stay an impious hand | |
| And cruel despots to withstand. | |
| Then on I strayed through towers vast | |
| That now stand open to the blast, | 40 |
| All roofless, split on every side, | |
| Where owls and bats can well abide, | |
| Such canopies of creeping flowers | |
| Combine with walls to make their bowers, | |
| Through courts where huge trees cast a shade | 45 |
| As in some haunted forest glade, | |
| Through many a grim, spacious room | |
| Where all is desolation, gloom; | |
| Each window still with iron barred, | |
| As suiting manners stern and hard, | 50 |
| If possible, more dreary still, | |
| From such left traces of the skill | |
| Which fashioned all things that you see, | |
| If not for pain, with mystery. | |
| |
