You leave us: you will see the Rhine, And those fair hills I sail'd below, When I was there with him; and go By summer belts of wheat and vine
To where he breathed his latest breath, That City. All her splendour seems No livelier than the wisp that gleams On Lethe in the eyes of Death.
Let her great Danube rolling fair Enwind her isles, unmark'd of me: I have not seen, I will not see Vienna; rather dream that there,
A treble darkness, Evil haunts The birth, the bridal; friend from friend Is oftener parted, fathers bend Above more graves, a thousand wants
Gnarr at the heels of men, and prey By each cold hearth, and sadness flings Her shadow on the blaze of kings: And yet myself have heard him say,
That not in any mother town With statelier progress to and fro The double tides of chariots flow By park and suburb under brown
Of lustier leaves; nor more content, He told me, lives in any crowd, When all is gay with lamps, and loud With sport and song, in booth and tent,
Imperial halls, or open plain; And wheels the circled dance, and breaks The rocket molten into flakes Of crimson or in emerald rain.
-Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H., Canto XCVIII