British Poets of the Nineteenth Century

Diffused and motionless, on the smooth brink

Of that obscurest chasm;--and thus he lay,

Surrendering to their final impulses The hovering powers of life. Hope and despair,

The torturers, slept; no mortal pain or fear

Marred his repose, the influxes of sense, And his own being unalloyed by pain, Yet feebler and more feeble, calmly fed The stream of thought, till he lay breathing there

At peace, and faintly smiling:-his last sight

Was the great moon, which o'er the western line

Of the wide world her mighty horn suspended,

With whose dun beams inwoven darkness seemed

To mingle. Now upon the jagged hills It rests, and still as the divided frame Of the vast meteor sunk, the Poet's blood, That ever beat in mystic sympathy With nature's ebb and flow, grew feebler still:

And when two lessening points of light alone

Gleamed through the darkness, the alternate gasp

Of his faint respiration scarce did stir The stagnate night-till the minutest ray

Was quenched, the pulse yet lingered in his heart.

paused-it fluttered. But when heaven remained

Utterly black, the murky shades involved

An image, silent, cold, and motionless, As their own voiceless earth and vacant

air.

And beasts and men live on, and mighty Earth

From sea and mountain, city and wilderness,

In vesper low or joyous orison,

Lifts still its solemn voice:-but thou art fled

Thou canst no longer know or love the shapes

Of this phantasmal scene, who have to

groans,

The passionate tumult of a clinging hope; But pale despair and cold tranquillity, Nature's vast frame, the web of human things,

Birth and the grave, that are not as they were. .1 1815. March, 1816.

1 None of Shelley's poems is more characteristic than this. The solemn spirit that reigns throughout, the worship of the majesty of nature, the broodings of a poet's heart in solitude -the mingling of the exulting joy which the various aspects of the visible universe inspires with the sad and struggling pangs which human passion imparts-give a touching interest to the whole. The death which he had often contemplated during the last months as certain and near he here represented in such colors as had, in his lonely musings, soothed his soul to peace. The versification sustains the solemn spirit which breathes throughout: it is peculiarly melodious. The poem ought rather to be considered didactic than narrative; it was the outpouring of his own emotions, embodied in the purest form he could conceive, painted in the ideal hues which his brilliant imagination inspired, and softened by the recent anticipation of death. (Mrs. Shelley's note.)

The deeper meaning of Alastor is to be found, not in the thought of death nor in the poet's recent commanings with nature, but in the motto from St. Augustine placed upon its titlepage, and in the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, composed about a year later. Enamored of ideal loveliness, the poet pursues his vision through the universe, vainly hoping to assuage the thirst which has been stimulated in his spirit, and vainly longing for some mortal realization of his love. Alastor, like Epipsychidion, reveals the mistake which Shelley made in thinking that the idea of beauty could become incarnate for him in any earthly form while the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty recognizes the truth that such realization of the ideal is impossible. The very last letter written by Shelley sets the misconception in its proper light: "I think one is always in love with something or

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Remain the records of their vain en

deavor,

Frail spells-whose uttered charm might not avail to sever,

From all we hear and all we see, Doubt, chance, and mutability. Thy light alone-like mist o'er mountains driven,

Or music by the night wind sent, Thro' strings of some still instrument,

Or moonlight on a midnight stream, Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.

Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart

And come, for some uncertain moments lent.

Man were immortal, and omnipotent, Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,

Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.

Thou messenger of sympathies. That wax and wane in lovers' eyes-Thou--that to human thought art nourishment,

Like darkness to a dying flame! Depart not as thy shadow came, Depart not-lest the grave should be, ike life and fear, a dark reality.

While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped

Thro' many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,

And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing

Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.

I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed;

I was not heard--I saw them not--
When musing deeply on the lot
Of life, at the sweet time when winds
are wooing

All vital things that wake to bring
News of birds and blossoming,-
Sudden, thy shadow fell on me ;

I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!

I vowed that I would dedicate my powers To thee and thine--have I not kept the vow?

LINES WRITTEN IN THE VALE OF
CHAMOUNI

THE everlasting universe of things Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,

1 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 a Six Weeks' Tour, and Letters from Switzerland: "The poem entitled Mont Blane is written by the author of the two letters from Chamouni and Vevai. It was composed under the immediate impression of the deep and 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 untaniable wildness and inaccessible solemnity from which those feelings sprang." (From Mrs. Shelley's Note on the Poems of 1816.) Compare Coleridge's Hymn before Sunrise in