Sordello by Robert Browning — Read

The thought of Eglamor's least like a thought, / And yet a false one, was, "Man shrinks to naught / If matched with symbols of immensity; / Must quail, forsooth, before a quiet sky / Or sea, too little for their quietude: " / And, truly, somewhat in Sordello's mood / Confirmed its speciousness, while eve slow sank / Down the near terrace to the farther bank, / And only one spot left from out the night / Glimmered, upon the river opposite -- / A breadth of watery heaven like a bay, / A sky-like space of water, ray for ray, / And star for star, one richness where they mixed / As this and that wing of an angel, fixed, / Tumultuary splendors folded in / To die. Nor turned he till Ferrara's din / (Say, the monotonous speech from a man's lip / Who lets some first and eager purpose slip / In a new fancy's birth; the speech keeps on / Though elsewhere its informing soul be gone) / -- Aroused him, surely offered succor. Fate / Paused with this eve; ere she precipitate / Herself, -- best put off new strange thoughts awhile, / That voice, those large hands, that portentous smile, -- / What help to pierce the future as the past, / Lay in the plaining city?

And at last / The main discovery and prime concern, / All that just now imported him to learn, / Truth's self, like yonder slow moon to complete / Heaven, rose again, and, naked at his feet, / Lighted his old life's every shift and change, / Effort with counter-effort; nor the range / Of each looked wrong except wherein it checked / Some other -- which of these could he suspect, / Prying into them by the sudden blaze?