 | The Poetical Works of (Richard Monckton Milnes) Lord Houghton |  |
85
ON THE MAD-HOUSE AT VENICE.
“I looked and saw between us and the sun
A building on an island, such an one
As age to age might add, for uses vile,
A windowless, deformed, and dreary pile;
And on the top an open tower, where hung
A bell, which in the radiance swayed and swung,—
We could just hear its hoarse and iron tongue;
The broad sun sank behind it, and it tolled
In strong and black relief. ‘What we behold
Shall be the Madhouse and its belfry tower,’
Said Maddalo.”
Shelley.
A building on an island, such an one
As age to age might add, for uses vile,
A windowless, deformed, and dreary pile;
And on the top an open tower, where hung
A bell, which in the radiance swayed and swung,—
We could just hear its hoarse and iron tongue;
The broad sun sank behind it, and it tolled
In strong and black relief. ‘What we behold
Shall be the Madhouse and its belfry tower,’
Said Maddalo.”
Shelley.
Honour aright the philosophic thought,
That they who, by the trouble of the brain
Or heart, for usual life are overwrought,
Hither should come to discipline their pain.
A single convent on a shoaly plain
Of waters never changing their dull face
But by the sparkles of thick-falling rain
Or lines of puny waves,—such is the place.
Strong medicine enters by the ear and eye;
That low unaltering dash against the wall
May lull the angriest dream to vacancy;
And Melancholy, finding nothing strange,
For her poor self to jar upon at all,
Frees her sad-centred thoughts, and gives them pleasant range.
| The Poetical Works of (Richard Monckton Milnes) Lord Houghton | |