There’s an oft quoted passage in Lord Byron’s 1812 “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”. Like a lot of things you can read into it what you want π Is the narrative poem the melancholy tale of a disillusioned man and his travels? A stanza features in the romantic film “The Bridges of Madison County” when Robert Kincaid dedicates his book to Francesca Johnson:
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.
(Canto 4, Stanza 178)