There is a pleasure in the pathless woods

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 😉 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)

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