Page:The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Volume 2).djvu/217

Rh 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-dæmon taught her young 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.

IV. 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 sound 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, Slow 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