Such sylvan quietudes Become old age.

These huge centennial oaks, That may have heard in infancy the trumpets Of Barbarossa's cavalry, deride Man's brief existence, that with all his strength He cannot stretch beyond the hundredth year.
This little acorn, turbaned like the Turk, Which with my foot I spurn, may be an oak Hereafter, feeding with its bitter mast The fierce wild boar, and tossing in its arms The cradled nests of birds, when all the men That now inhabit this vast universe, They and their children, and their children's children, Shall be but dust and mould, and nothing more.
Through openings in the trees I see below me The valley of Clitumnus, with its farms And snow-white oxen grazing in the shade Of the tall poplars on the river's brink.
O Nature, gentle mother, tender nurse! I who have never loved thee as I ought, But wasted all my years immured in cities, And breathed the stifling atmosphere of streets, Now come to thee for refuge.

Here is peace.
Yonder I see the little hermitages Dotting the mountain side with points of light, And here St.Julian's convent, like a nest Of curlews, clinging to some windy cliff.
Beyond the broad, illimitable plain Down sinks the sun, red as Apollo's quoit, That, by the envious Zephyr blown aside, Struck Hyacinthus dead, and stained the earth With his young blood, that blossomed into flowers.
And now, instead of these fair deities Dread demons haunt the earth; hermits inhabit The leafy homes of sylvan Hamadryads; And jovial friars, rotund and rubicund, Replace the old Silenus with his ass.
Here underneath these venerable oaks, Wrinkled and brown and gnarled like them with age, A brother of the monastery sits, Lost in his meditations.

What may be The questions that perplex, the hopes that cheer him?
Good-evening, holy father.
MONK.
God be with you.
MICHAEL ANGELO.
Pardon a stranger if he interrupt Your meditations.
MONK.
It was but a dream,-- The old, old dream, that never will come true; The dream that all my life I have been dreaming, And yet is still a dream.
MICHAEL ANGELO.
All men have dreams: I have had mine; but none of them came true; They were but vanity.

Sometimes I think The happiness of man lies in pursuing, Not in possessing; for the things possessed Lose half their value.