With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now I call the phantoms of a thousand hours Each from his voiceless grave: they have in visioned bowers 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. 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 thro' 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 Its calm-to one who worships thee, To fear himself, and love all human kind 1816. 1817 MONT BLANC1 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 val leys, 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 Blanc 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 untamiable 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 |