Explore "The Garden of Boccaccio" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Of late, in one of those most weary hours, / When life seems emptied of all genial powers, / A dreary mood, which he who ne'er has known / May bless his happy lot, I sate alone; / And, from the numbing spell to win relief, / Call'd on the Past for thought of glee or grief. / In vain! bereft alike of grief and glee, / I sate and cow'r'd o'er my own vacancy! / And as I watch'd the dull continuous ache, / Which, all else slum'bring, seem'd alone to wake; / O Friend! long wont to notice yet conceal, / And soothe by silence what words cannot heal, / I but half saw that quiet hand of thine / Place on my desk this exquisite design. / Boccaccio's Garden and its faery, / The love, the joyaunce, and the gallantry! / An Idyll, with Boccaccio's spirit warm, / Framed in the silent poesy of form. / Like flocks adown a newly-bathed steep / Emerging from a mist: or like a stream / Of music soft that not dispels the sleep, / But casts in happier moulds the slumberer's dream, / Gazed by an idle eye with silent might / The picture stole upon my inward sight.
A tremulous warmth crept gradual o'er my chest, / As though an infant's finger touch'd my breast. / And one by one (I know not whence) were brought / All spirits of power that most had stirr'd my thought / In selfless boyhood, on a new world tost / Of wonder, and in its own fancies lost; / Or charm'd my youth, that, kindled from above, / Loved ere it loved, and sought a form for love; / Or lent a lustre to the earnest scan / Of manhood, musing what and whence is man! / Wild strain of Scalds, that in the sea-worn caves / Rehearsed their war-spell to the winds and waves; / Or fateful hymn of those prophetic maids, / That call'd on Hertha in deep forest glades; / Or minstrel lay, that cheer'd the baron's feast; / Or rhyme of city pomp, of monk and priest, / Judge, mayor, and many a guild in long array, / To high-church pacing on the great saint's day. / And many a verse which to myself I sang, / That woke the tear yet stole away the pang, / Of hopes which in lamenting I renew'd.