The Complete Poetical Works, vol 2 | Page 7

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?By all, but which the wise, and great, and good?Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.
4.?The fields, the lakes, the forests, and the streams,?Ocean, and all the living things that dwell _85 Within the daedal earth; lightning, and rain,?Earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane,?The torpor of the year when feeble dreams?Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep?Holds every future leaf and flower;--the bound _90 With which from that detested trance they leap;?The works and ways of man, their death and birth,?And that of him and all that his may be;?All things that move and breathe with toil and sound?Are born and die; revolve, subside, and swell. _95 Power dwells apart in its tranquillity,?Remote, serene, and inaccessible:?And THIS, the naked countenance of earth,?On which I gaze, even these primaeval mountains?Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep _100 Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains, Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice,?Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power?Have piled: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,?A city of death, distinct with many a tower _105 And wall impregnable of beaming ice.?Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin?Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky?Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing?Its destined path, or in the mangled soil _110 Branchless and shattered stand; the rocks, drawn down?From yon remotest waste, have overthrown?The limits of the dead and living world,?Never to be reclaimed. The dwelling-place?Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil; _115 Their food and their retreat for ever gone,?So much of life and joy is lost. The race?Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling?Vanish, like smoke before the tempest's stream,?And their place is not known. Below, vast caves _120 Shine in the rushing torrents' restless gleam,?Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling?Meet in the vale, and one