The Complete Poetical Works, vol 2 | Page 7

that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and
thine--have I not kept the vow?
With beating heart and streaming
eyes, even now
I call the phantoms of a thousand hours

Each from

his voiceless grave: they have in visioned bowers _65 Of studious zeal
or love's delight
Outwatched with me the envious night--
They
know that never joy illumed my brow
Unlinked with hope that thou
wouldst free
This world from its dark slavery, _70 That thou--O
awful LOVELINESS,
Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot
express.
7.
The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is
past--there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky, _75 Which
through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it
had not been!
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on
my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply _80 Its
calm--to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,

Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all
human kind.
NOTES:
_2 among 1819; amongst 1817.
_14 dost 1819; doth 1817.

_21 fear and dream 1819; care and pain Boscombe manuscript.
37-48 omitted Boscombe manuscript.
_44 art 1817; are 1819.
_76
or 1819; nor 1839.
***
MONT BLANC.
LINES WRITTEN IN THE VALE OF CHAMOUNI.
[Composed in Switzerland, July, 1816 (see date below). Printed at the
end of the "History of a Six Weeks' Tour" published by Shelley in 1817,
and reprinted with "Posthumous Poems", 1824. Amongst the
Boscombe manuscripts is a draft of this Ode, mainly in pencil, which
has been collated by Dr. Garnett.]
1.
The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and
rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark--now glittering--now reflecting
gloom--
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The

source of human thought its tribute brings _5 Of waters,--with a sound
but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume
In the wild
woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap
for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river _10 Over
its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.
2.
Thus thou, Ravine of Arve--dark, deep Ravine--
Thou
many-coloured, many-voiced vale,
Over whose pines, and crags, and
caverns sail
Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams: awful scene, _15
Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down
From the ice-gulfs
that gird his secret throne,
Bursting through these dark mountains like
the flame
Of lightning through the tempest;--thou dost lie,
Thy
giant brood of pines around thee clinging, _20 Children of elder time,
in whose devotion
The chainless winds still come and ever came
To
drink their odours, and their mighty swinging
To hear--an old and
solemn harmony;
Thine earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep
_25 Of the ethereal waterfall, whose veil
Robes some unsculptured
image; the strange sleep
Which when the voices of the desert fail

Wraps all in its own deep eternity;--
Thy caverns echoing to the
Arve's commotion, _30 A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame;

Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion,
Thou art the path of
that unresting sound--
Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee
I
seem as in a trance sublime and strange _35 To muse on my own
separate fantasy,
My own, my human mind, which passively
Now
renders and receives fast influencings,
Holding an unremitting
interchange
With the clear universe of things around; _40 One legion
of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings
Now float above thy
darkness, and now rest
Where that or thou art no unbidden guest,
In
the still cave of the witch Poesy,
Seeking among the shadows that
pass by _45 Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee,
Some
phantom, some faint image; till the breast
From which they fled
recalls them, thou art there!
3.

Some say that gleams of a remoter world
Visit the soul in

sleep,--that death is slumber, _50 And that its shapes the busy thoughts
outnumber
Of those who wake and live.--I look on high;
Has some
unknown omnipotence unfurled
The veil of life and death? or do I lie

In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep _55 Spread far
around and inaccessibly
Its circles? For the very spirit fails,
Driven
like a homeless cloud from steep to steep
That vanishes among the
viewless gales!
Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky, _60 Mont
Blanc appears,--still, snowy, and serene--
Its subject mountains their
unearthly forms
Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between

Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,
Blue as the overhanging
heaven, that spread _65 And wind among the accumulated steeps;
A
desert peopled by the storms alone,
Save when the eagle brings some
hunter's bone,
And the wolf tracts her there--how hideously
Its
shapes are heaped around! rude, bare, and high, _70 Ghastly, and
scarred, and riven.--Is this the scene
Where the old
Earthquake-daemon taught her young
Ruin? Were these their toys? or
did a sea
Of fire envelope once this silent snow?
None can
reply--all seems eternal now. _75 The wilderness has a mysterious
tongue
Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,
So solemn, so
serene, that man may be,
But for such faith, with nature reconciled;

Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal _80 Large codes of fraud
and woe; not understood
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