They know that never joy illumed my In the wild woods, among the mountains Unlinked with hope that thou Where waterfalls around it leap for ever, This world from its dark slavery, vast river That thou-O awful LOVELINESS, Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and Wouldst give whate'er these words can To fear himself, and love all human kind, MONT BLANC LINES WRITTEN IN THE VALE OF CHAMOUNI I THE everlasting universe of things raves. To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging To hear an old and solemn harmony; Thine earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep Of the ethereal waterfall, whose veil Robes some unsculptured image; the strange sleep Which when the voices of the desert fail Flows through the mind, and rolls its Wraps all in its own deep eternity;- rapid waves, Now dark-now glittering-now reflecting gloom Now lending splendour, where from secret springs The source of human thought its tribute brings Of waters, with a sound but half its own, Such as a feeble brook will oft assume Thy caverns echoing to the Arve's com motion, A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame; Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion, Thou art the path of that unresting Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee To muse on my own separate phantasy, My own, my human mind, which passively Now renders and receives fast influencings, Holding an unremitting interchange And wind among the accumulated steeps; And the wolf tracks her there-how With the clear universe of things around; Its shapes are heaped around! rude, One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings Now float above thy darkness, and now rest Where that or thou art no unbidden In the still cave of the witch Poesy, Some phantom, some faint image; till art there! bare, and high, Ghastly, and scarred, and riven.-Is this the scene Where the old Earthquake - dæmon taught her young Ruin ? Were these their toys? or did a sea Of fire, envelope once this silent snow? From which they fled recalls them, thou So solemn, so serene, that man may be But for such faith with nature reconciled; Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal Some say that gleams of a remoter world Visit the soul in sleep,-that death is slumber, 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 Spread far around and inaccessibly to steep That vanishes among the viewless gales! serene Its subject mountains their unearthly forms 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. IV The fields, the lakes, the forests, and the streams, Ocean, and all the living things that dwell Within the dædal earth; lightning, and rain, Earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurri cane, The torpor of the year when feeble Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep the bound Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales With which from that detested trance All things that move and breathe with Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling toil and sound Are born and die; revolve, subside, and Meet in the vale, and one majestic River, dwelling Vanish, like smoke before the tempest's CANCELLED PASSAGE OF MONT stream, And their place is not known. Below, vast caves BLANC THERE is a voice, not understood by all, Shine in the rushing torrents' restless Sent from these desert-caves. It is the Of the rent ice-cliff which the sunbeams by others, yet the effect of the whole was call, Plunging into the vale-it is the blast Descending on the pines-the torrents pour. FRAGMENT: HOME DEAR home, thou scene of earliest hopes and joys, The least of which wronged Memory ever makes fascinating and delightful. Mont Blanc was inspired by a view of that mountain and its surrounding peaks and valleys, as he lingered on the Bridge of Arve on his way through the Valley of Chamouni. Shelley makes the following mention of this poem in his publication of the History of Six Weeks Tour, and Letters from Switzerland: "The poem entitled Mont Blanc is written by the author of the two letters from Chamouni and Vevai. It was composed under the Bitterer than all thine unremembered immediate impression of the deep and tears. FRAGMENT: HELEN AND HENRY A SHOVEL of his ashes took And so they followed hard- NOTE ON POEMS OF 1816, BY MRS. SHELLEY SHELLEY wrote little during this year. The poem entitled The Sunset was written in the Spring of the year, while still residing at Bishopgate. He spent the summer on the shores of the Lake of Geneva, The Hymn to Intellectual Beauty was conceived during his voyage round the lake with Lord Byron. He occupied himself during this voyage by reading the Nouvelle Héloïse for the first time. The reading it on the very spot where the scenes are laid added to the interest; and he was at once surprised and charmed by the passionate eloquence and earnest enthralling interest that pervade this work. There was some thing in the character of Saint-Preux, in his abnegation of self, and in the worship he paid to Love, that coincided with Shelley's own disposition; and, though differing in many of the views and shocked powerful feelings excited by the objects which it attempts to describe; and, as an undisciplined overflowing of the soul, rests its claim to approbation on an attempt to imitate the untamable wildness and inaccessible solemnity from which those feelings sprang." This was an eventful year, and less time was given to study than usual. In the list of his reading I find, in Greek, Theocritus, the Prometheus of schylus, several of Plutarch's Lives, and the works of Lucian. In Latin, Lucretius, Pliny's Letters, the Annals and Germany of Tacitus. In French, the History of the French Revolution by Lacretelle. He read for the first time, this year, Montaigne's Essays, and regarded them ever after as one of the most delightful and instructive books in the world. The list is scanty in English works: Locke's Essay, Political Justice, and Coleridge's Lay Sermon, form nearly the whole. It was his frequent habit to read aloud to me in the evening; in this way we read, this year, the New Testament, Paradise Lost, Spenser's Faery Queen, and Don Quixote. POEMS WRITTEN IN 1817 MARIANNE'S DREAM I A PALE dream came to a Lady fair, And said, A boon, a boon, I pray! I know the secrets of the air, And things are lost in the glare of day, |