Clarens! sweet Clarens, birthplace of deep Love,
  Thine air is the young breath of passionate thought,
  Thy trees take root in Love; the snows above
  The very glaciers have his colours caught,
  And sunset into rose-hues sees them wrought
  By rays which sleep there lovingly; the rocks,
  The permanent crags, tell here of Love.

Yet

  Ever and anon of griefs subdued
  There comes a token like a scorpion’s sting,
  Scarce seen, but with fresh bitterness imbued;
  And slight withal may be the things which bring
  Back on the heart the weight which it would fling
  Aside for ever; it may be a sound,
  A tone of music, summer’s eve or spring,
  A flower, the wind, the ocean, which shall wound,
  Striking the electric chain with which we are darkly bound.

The unrest and torment of his own heart he finds reflected in Nature: 

  The roar of waters! from the headlong height
  Velino cleaves the wave-worn precipice;
  The fall of waters! rapid as the light
  The flashing mass foams, shaking the abyss;
  The hell of waters! where they howl and hiss,
  And boil in endless torture; while the sweat
  Of their great agony, wrung out from this
  Their Phlegethon, curls round the rocks of jet
  That gird the gulf around, in pitiless horror set,
  And mounts in spray the skies, and thence again
  Returns in an unceasing shower, which round
  With its unemptied cloud of gentle rain
  Is an eternal April to the ground,
  Making it all one emerald; how profound
  The gulf, and how the giant element
  From rock to rock leaps with delirious bound,
  Crushing the cliffs, which downward, worn and rent
  With his fierce footsteps, yields in chasms a fearful rent.... 
  Horribly beautiful! but, on the verge
  From side to side, beneath the glittering morn,
  An Iris sits amidst the infernal surge,
  Like Hope upon a deathbed.

The ‘enormous skeleton’ of Rome impresses him most by moonlight: 

  When the rising moon begins to climb
  Its topmost arch, and gently pauses there;
  When the stars twinkle through the loops of time,
  And the low night breeze waves along the air!

Underlying all his varying moods is this note: 

  There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
  There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
  There is society, where none intrudes,
  By the deep sea, and music in its roar: 
  I love not man the less, but Nature more,
  From these our interviews, in which I steal
  From all I may be, or have been before,
  To mingle with the Universe and feel
  What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.

The sea, the sky with its stars and clouds, and the mountains, are his passion: