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.

   Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean–roll!
   Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
   Man marks the earth with ruin–his control
   Stops with the shore;–upon the watery plain
   The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
   A shadow of man’s ravage, save his own,
   When for a moment, like a drop of rain,
   He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.

   His steps are not upon thy paths,–thy fields
   Are not a spoil for him,–thou dost arise
   And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields
   For earth’s destruction thou dost all despise,
   Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,
   And send’st him, shivering in thy playful spray
   And howling, to his gods, where haply lies
   His petty hope in some near port or bay,
And dashest him again to earth: —there let him lay.

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is a long narrative poem in four parts written by Lord Byron. The poem was published between 1812 and 1818. Dedicated to “Ianthe”, it describes the travels and reflections of a world-weary young man, who is disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry and looks for distraction in foreign lands. In a wider sense, it is an expression of the melancholy and disillusionment felt by a generation weary of the wars of the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. The title comes from the term childe, a medieval title for a young man who was a candidate for knighthood.

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods (The Bridges of Madison County)