Which human hearts must feel, while human tongues
Tremble to speak, they did rage horribly,
Breathing in self contempt fierce blasphemies
Against the Dæmon of the World, and high
Hurling their armèd hands where the pure Spirit,

Serene and inaccessibly secure,

Stood on an isolated pinnacle,

The flood of ages combating below
The depth of the unbounded universe

Above, and all around

Necessity's unchanging harmony.

THE END

[of Alastor and other Poems.]

The imprint of the Alastor volume is as follows:

"Printed by S. Hamilton, Weybridge, Surrey."

285

290

MONT BLANC.

[The next book put forth by Shelley after Alastor and other Poems was the little volume containing, among other things, the following poem, and whereof the title runs thus: "History of a Six Weeks' Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland: with Letters descriptive of a Sail Round the Lake of Geneva, and of the Glaciers of Chamouni. London, Published by T. Hookham, Jun. Old Bond Street; and C. and J. Ollier, Welbeck Street. 1817." The History and two of the letters are by Mrs. Shelley,—the rest of the letters, two in number, by Shelley to Peacock. This poem, as well as the Alastor, was included in the volume of Posthumous Poems (1824). In Shelley's preface to the Six Weeks' Tour, it is stated that Mont Blanc "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 untameable wildness and inaccessible solemnity from which those feelings sprang." Mrs. Shelley says the poem was inspired by the view, as Shelley "lingered on the Bridge of Arve on his way through the Vale of Chamouni."—H. B. F.]

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 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

5

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.

10

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 shadows1 and sunbeams: awful scene,
Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down
From the ice gulphs that gird his secret throne,
Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame
Of lightning thro' the tempest;-thou dost lie,

15

I take it Shelley meant cloudshadows, but omitted the hyphen, as he often does in such cases, e. g. in the next line but one, ice gulphs.

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 ethereal waterfall, whose veil

Robes some unsculptured image; the strange sleep
Which when the voices of the desart 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 phantasy,
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,

1 The in Mrs. Shelley's editions of 1839.