What I love best in all the world
Is a castle, precipice-encurled,
In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine. 
Or look for me, old fellow of mine,
(If I get my head from out the mouth
O’ the grave, and loose my spirit’s bands,
And come again to the land of lands)—­ 20
In a sea-side house to the farther South,
Where the baked cicala dies of drouth,
And one sharp tree—­’tis a cypress—­stands,
By the many hundred years red-rusted,
Bough iron-spiked, ripe fruit-o’ercrusted,
My sentinel to guard the sands
To the water’s edge.  For, what expands
Before the house, but the great opaque
Blue breadth of sea without a break? 
While, in the house, forever crumbles 30
Some fragment of the frescoed walls,
From blisters where a scorpion sprawls. 
A girl bare-footed brings, and tumbles
Down on the pavement, green-flesh melons,
And says there’s news to-day—­the king
Was shot at, touched in the liver-wing,
Goes with his Bourbon arm in a sling: 
—­She hopes they have not caught the felons. 
Italy, my Italy! 
Queen Mary’s saying serves for me—­ 40
    (When fortune’s malice
    Lost her, Calais)
Open my heart and you will see
Graved inside of it, “Italy.” 
Such lovers old are I and she: 
So it always was, so shall ever be!

* * * * *

THE ITALIAN IN ENGLAND

That second time they hunted me
From hill to plain, from shore to sea,
And Austria, hounding far and wide
Her blood-hounds thro’ the country-side,
Breathed hot an instant on my trace,—­
I made, six days, a hiding-place
Of that dry green old aqueduct
Where I and Charles, deg. when boys, have plucked deg.8
The fire-flies from the roof above,
Bright creeping thro’ the moss they love:  10
—­How long it seems since Charles was lost! 
Six days the soldiers crossed, and crossed
The country in my very sight;
And when that peril ceased at night,
The sky broke out in red dismay
With signal-fires.  Well, there I lay
Close covered o’er in my recess,
Up to the neck in ferns and cress. 
Thinking on Metternich, deg. our friend, deg.19
And Charles’s miserable end, 20
And much beside, two days; the third,
Hunger o’ercame me when I heard
The peasants from the village go
To work among the maize:  you know,
With us in Lombardy, deg. they bring deg.25
Provisions packed on mules, a string,
With little bells that cheer their task,
And casks, and boughs on every cask
To keep the sun’s heat from the wine;