Perhaps few passages of descriptive poetry excel that in which reference is made to the column of Avenches, the ancient Aventicum.  It combines with an image distinct and picturesque, poetical associations full of the grave and moral breathings of olden forms and hoary antiquity.

   By a lone wall, a lonelier column rears
   A gray and grief-worn aspect of old days: 
   ’Tis the last remnant of the wreck of years,
   And looks as with the wild-bewilder’d gaze
   Of one to stone converted by amaze,
   Yet still with consciousness; and there it stands,
   Making a marvel that it not decays,
   When the coeval pride of human hands,
Levell’d Aventicum, hath strew’d her subject lands.

But the most remarkable quality in the third canto is the deep, low bass of thought which runs through several passages, and which gives to it, when considered with reference to the circumstances under which it was written, the serious character of documentary evidence as to the remorseful condition of the poet’s mind.  It would be, after what has already been pointed out in brighter incidents, affectation not to say, that these sad bursts of feeling and wild paroxysms, bear strong indications of having been suggested by the wreck of his domestic happiness, and dictated by contrition for the part he had himself taken in the ruin.  The following reflections on the unguarded hour, are full of pathos and solemnity, amounting almost to the deep and dreadful harmony of Manfred: 

   To fly from, need not be to hate, mankind;
   All are not fit with them to stir and toil,
   Nor is it discontent to keep the mind
   Deep in its fountain, lest it overboil
   In the hot throng, where we become the spoil
   Of our infection, till too late and long
   We may deplore and struggle with the coil,
   In wretched interchange of wrong for wrong
’Midst a contentious world, striving where none are strong.

   There, in a moment, we may plunge our years
   In fatal penitence, and in the blight
   Of our own soul, turn all our blood to tears,
   And colour things to come with hues of night;
   The race of life becomes a hopeless flight
   To those who walk in darkness:  on the sea,
   The boldest steer but where their ports invite;
   But there are wanderers o’er eternity,
Whose bark drives on and on, and anchor’d ne’er shall be.

These sentiments are conceived in the mood of an awed spirit; they breathe of sorrow and penitence.  Of the weariness of satiety the pilgrim no more complains; he is no longer despondent from exhaustion, and the lost appetite of passion, but from the weight of a burden which he cannot lay down; and he clings to visible objects, as if from their nature he could extract a moral strength.