Page:The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Volume 2).djvu/216

202 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, 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, 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 desart peopled by the storms alone.