Amours de Voyage | Page 3

Arthur Hugh Clough
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This Project Gutenberg Etext prepared by
Ed Brandon
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), using the 1903 Macmillan
edition of
Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough.
Amours de Voyage
Arthur Hugh Clough
Oh, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio,
And taste with a distempered
appetite!
Shakspeare

Il doutait de tout, meme de l'amour.
French Novel
Solvitur ambulando.
Solutio Sophismatum.
Flevit amores
Non elaboratum ad pedem.
Horace
AMOURS DE VOYAGE.
Canto I.
Over the great windy waters, and over the clear-crested summits,

Unto the sun and the sky, and unto the perfecter earth,
Come, let us
go,--to a land wherein gods of the old time wandered,
Where every
breath even now changes to ether divine.
Come, let us go; though
withal a voice whisper, 'The world that we live in,
Whithersoever we
turn, still is the same narrow crib;
'Tis but to prove limitation, and
measure a cord, that we travel;
Let who would 'scape and be free go
to his chamber and think;
'Tis but to change idle fancies for memories
wilfully falser;
'Tis but to go and have been.'--Come, little bark! let us
go.
I. Claude to Eustace.
Dear Eustatio, I write that you may write me an answer,
Or at the
least to put us again en rapport with each other.
Rome disappoints me
much,--St Peter's, perhaps, in especial;
Only the Arch of Titus and
view from the Lateran please me:
This, however, perhaps is the
weather, which truly is horrid.
Greece must be better, surely; and yet
I am feeling so spiteful,
That I could travel to Athens, to Delphi, and
Troy, and Mount Sinai,
Though but to see with my eyes that these are

vanity also.
Rome disappoints me much; I hardly as yet understand it,
but
RUBBISHY seems the word that most exactly would suit it.
All
the foolish destructions, and all the sillier savings,
All the
incongruous things of past incompatible ages,
Seem to be treasured
up here to make fools of present and future.
Would to Heaven the old
Goths had made a cleaner sweep of it!
Would to Heaven some new
ones would come and destroy these churches!
However, one can live
in Rome as also in London.
It is a blessing, no doubt, to be rid, at
least for a time, of
All one's friends and relations,--yourself (forgive
me!) included,--
All the assujettissement of having been what one has
been,
What one thinks one is, or thinks that others suppose one;
Yet,
in despite of all, we turn like fools to the English.
Vernon has been
my fate; who is here the same that you knew him,--
Making the tour,
it seems, with friends of the name of Trevellyn.
II. Claude to Eustace.
Rome disappoints me still; but I shrink and adapt myself to it.

Somehow a tyrannous sense of a superincumbent oppression
Still,
wherever I go, accompanies ever, and makes me
Feel like a tree (shall
I say?) buried under a ruin of brickwork.
Rome, believe me, my
friend, is like its own Monte Testaceo,
Merely a marvellous mass of
broken and castaway wine-pots.
Ye gods! what do I want with this
rubbish of ages departed,
Things that Nature abhors, the experiments
that she has failed in?
What do I find in the Forum? An archway and
two or three pillars.
Well, but St. Peter's? Alas, Bernini has filled it
with sculpture!
No one can cavil, I grant, at the size of the great
Coliseum.
Doubtless the notion of grand and capacious and massive
amusement,
This the old Romans had; but tell me, is this an idea?

Yet of solidity much, but of splendour little is extant:
'Brickwork I
found thee, and marble I left thee!' their Emperor vaunted;
'Marble I
thought thee, and brickwork I find thee!' the Tourist may answer.
III. Georgina Trevellyn to Louisa ----.

At last, dearest Louisa, I take up my pen to address you.
Here we are,
you see, with the seven-and-seventy boxes,
Courier, Papa and
Mamma, the children, and Mary and Susan:
Here we all are at Rome,
and delighted of course with St. Peter's,
And very pleasantly lodged
in the famous Piazza di Spagna.
Rome is a wonderful place, but Mary
shall tell you about it;
Not very gay, however; the English are mostly
at Naples;
There are the A.'s, we hear, and most of the W. party.

George, however, is come; did I tell you about his mustachios?
Dear,
I must really stop, for the carriage, they tell me, is waiting;
Mary will
finish; and Susan is writing, they say, to Sophia.
Adieu, dearest
Louise,--evermore your faithful Georgina.
Who can a Mr. Claude be
whom George has taken to be with?
Very stupid, I think, but George
says so VERY clever.
IV. Claude to Eustace.
No, the Christian faith, as at any rate I understood it,
With its
humiliations and exaltations combining,
Exaltations sublime, and yet
diviner abasements,
Aspirations from something most shameful here
upon earth and
In our poor selves to something most perfect above in
the heavens,--
No, the Christian faith, as I, at least, understood it,
Is
not here, O Rome, in any of these thy churches;
Is not here, but in
Freiburg, or Rheims, or Westminster Abbey.
What in thy Dome I find,
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