VII

The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past-there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,

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
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.

MONT BLANC

LINES WRITTEN IN THE VALE OF CHAMOUNI

75

80

[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 MSS. is a draft of this Ode, mainly in pencil, which has been collated by Dr. Garnett.]

I

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
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
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.

II

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,
Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down
From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne,

15

Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame
Of lightning through the tempest ;-thou dost lie,
Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging,
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
Of the aethereal waterfall, whose veil

76 or 1819; nor 1839.

1824; clouds, shadows 1839.

20

25

15 cloud-shadows] cloud shadows 1817; cloud, shadows 20 Thy 1824; The 1889.

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,
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
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;

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

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!

III

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

In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep
Spread far around and inaccessibly

55

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 tracks her there-how hideously

Its shapes are heaped around! rude, bare, and high, Gastly, 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 envelop once this silent snow? 53 unfurled upfurled ej. James Thomson ('B. V.'). 69 tracks her there 1824; watches her Boscombe MS.

70

56 Spread 1824; Speed 1839.

None can reply-all seems) eternal now.
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
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 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
With which from that detested trance they leap;

75

80

85

90

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.

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
And wall impregnable of beaming ice...
Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin

105

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

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;
Their food and their retreat for ever gone,
So much of life and joy is lost. The race

115

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
Shine in the rushing torrents' restless gleam,
Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling

120

79 But for such 1824; In such a Boscombe MS. 108 boundaries of the sky] boundary

of the skies cj. Rossetti (cf. l. 102, 106). 121 torrents'] torrent's 1817, 1824, 1839.

Meet in the vale, and one majestic River,
The breath and blood of distant lands, for ever
Rolls its loud waters to the ocean-waves,
Breathes its swift vapours to the circling air.

Mont Blanc yet gleams on high :-the power is there,
The still and solemn power of many sights,
And many sounds, and much of life and death.
In the calm darkness of the moonless nights,

In the lone glare of day, the snows descend

Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there,
Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun,

Or the star-beams dart through them :-Winds contend
Silently there, and heap the snow with breath

Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home
The voiceless lightning in these solitudes
Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods

Over the snow. The secret Strength of things

Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!

125

130

135

140

And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind's imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?

July 23, 1816.

of the

at all?

CANCELLED PASSAGE OF MONT BLANC

[Published by Garnett, Relics of Shelley, 1862.].

THERE is a voice, not understood by all,
Sent from these desert-caves. It is the roar
Of the rent ice-cliff which the sunbeams call,
Plunging into the vale-it is the blast
Descending on the pines-the torrents pour. . . .

FRAGMENT: HOME

[Published by Garnett, Relics of Shelley, 1862.]
DEAR home, thou scene of earliest hopes and joys,
The least of which wronged Memory ever makes
Bitterer than all thine unremembered tears.

FRAGMENT OF A GHOST STORY
[Published by Garnett, Relics of Shelley, 1862.]
A SHOVEL of his ashes took

From the hearth's obscurest nook,
Muttering mysteries as she went.
Helen and Henry knew that Granny
Was as much afraid of Ghosts as any,
And so they followed hard-
But Helen clung to her brother's arm,
And her own spasm made her shake.

5

NOTE ON POEMS OF 1816, BY MRS. SHELLEY SHELLEY wrote little during this is written by the author of the two year. The poem entitled The Sunset letters from Chamouni and Vevai. It was written in the spring of the year, was composed under the immediate while still residing at Bishopsgate. He impression of the deep and powerful spent the summer on the shores of the feelings excited by the objects which it Lake of Geneva. The Hymn to Intel- attempts to describe; and, as an unlectual Beauty was conceived during disciplined overflowing of the soul, rests his voyage round the lake with Lord its claim to approbation on an attempt Byron. He occupied himself during to imitate the untamable wildness and this voyage by reading the Nouvelle inaccessible solemnity from which those Heloise for the first time. The reading feelings sprang.' 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 something 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 by others, yet the effect of the whole was fascinating and delightful.

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 Aeschylus, 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 Mont Blanc was inspired by a view books in the world. The list is scanty of that mountain and its surrounding in English works: Locke's Essay, Polipeaks and valleys, as he lingered on tical Justice, and Coleridge's Lay Serthe Bridge of Arve on his way through mon, form nearly the whole. It was the Valley of Chamouni. Shelley makes his frequent habit to read aloud to me the following mention of this poem in in the evening; in this way we read, his publication of the History of a Six this year, the New Testament, Paradise Weeks' Tour, and Letters from Switzer- Lost, Spenser's Faery Queen, and Don land: "The poem entitled Mont Blanc | Quixote.

POEMS WRITTEN IN 1817

MARIANNE'S DREAM

[Composed at Marlow, 1817. Published in Hunt's Literary Pocket-Book, 1819, and reprinted in Posthumous Poems, 1824.]