When noon is past: there is a harmony In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which thro' 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 human kind.
LINES WRITTEN IN THE VALE OF CHAMOUNI.
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 forever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.
Thus thou, Ravine of Arve-dark, deep Ravine- Thou many-coloured, many-voiced vale,
Over whose pines and crags and caverns sail Fast clouds, 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, The 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 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 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
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!
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 Speed 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, 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
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,
Ghastly, and scarred, and riven.-Is this the scene Where the old earthquake-demon taught her
Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea Of fire envelope once this silent snow? 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.
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 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;
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
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 primæval mountains, Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep, Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains,
Slowly 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
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 Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling Vanish, like smoke before the tempest's stream,
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