All vital things that wake to bring I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy! 6. I vowed 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 its voiceless grave. in visioned bowers They have 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; That thou, O awful Loveliness, Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express. 7. The day becomes more solemn and serene When moon is past: there is a harmony In autumn, and a lustre in its sky, Which through the summer is not heard nor 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 humankind. MONT BLANC. LINES WRITTEN IN THE VALE OF CHAMOUNI. I. THE everlasting universe of Things Flows through the Mind, and rolls its rapid waves, Now dark-now glittering-now reflecting gloom Now lendíng 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. 2. Thus thou, Ravine of Arve-dark, deep Thou many-coloured many-voiced vale, 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, 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 Robes Of the etherial waterfall, whose veil 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 ! thee, And, when I gaze on I seem, as in a trance sublime and strange, To muse on my own separate fantasy, ings, 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, Ghosts of all things that are some shade 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, 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 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, |