There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, there is…

The lines open stanza 178 of the fourth and last canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the beginning of its great close by the sea. In the stanza before, the poet has wished that the desert were his dwelling-place, “With one fair Spirit for my minister, That I might all forget the human race”. The stanza continues: “There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep Sea, and Music in its roar: I love not Man the less, but Nature more.” The next stanza begins the famous apostrophe “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean—roll!”, and the canto ends a few stanzas later.

Byron wrote the canto in Venice in 1817, a year after leaving England for good, and published it in 1818; in it he dropped the pretence of Childe Harold and spoke in his own voice.

The lines are among the most quoted of Byron’s, engraved on benches and cited whenever solitude in nature is defended, usually without the misanthropy that surrounds them.

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto IV, stanza 178, 1818

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work