Page:The complete poetical works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, including materials never before printed in any edition of the poems.djvu/392

362 Of all we would believe, and sadly blame The jarring and inexplicable frame Of this wrong world:—and then anatomize The purposes and thoughts of men whose eyes Were closed in distant years;—or widely guess The issue of the earth's great business, When we shall be as we no longer are— Like babbling gossips safe, who hear the war Of winds, and sigh, but tremble not;—or how You listened to some interrupted flow Of visionary rhyme,—in joy and pain Struck from the inmost fountains of my brain, With little skill perhaps;—or how we sought Those deepest wells of passion or of thought Wrought by wise poets in the waste of years, Staining their sacred waters with our tears; Quenching a thirst ever to be renewed! Or how I, wisest lady! then endued The language of a land which now is free, And, winged with thoughts of truth and majesty, Flits round the tyrant's sceptre like a cloud, And bursts the peopled prisons, and cries aloud, 'My name is Legion!'—that majestic tongue Which Calderon over the desert flung Of ages and of nations; and which found An echo in our hearts, and with the sound Startled oblivion:—thou wert then to me As is a nurse—when inarticulately A child would talk as its grown parents do. If living winds the rapid clouds pursue, If hawks chase doves through the aethereal way, Huntsmen the innocent deer, and beasts their prey, Why should not we rouse with the spirit's blast Out of the forest of the pathless past These recollected pleasures? You are now In London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more. Yet in its depth what treasures! You will see That which was Godwin,—greater none than he Though fallen—and fallen on evil times—to stand Among the spirits of our age and land, Before the dread tribunal of to come The foremost,—while Rebuke cowers pale and dumb. You will see Coleridge —he who sits obscure In the exceeding lustre and the pure