Page:The complete poetical works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, including materials never before printed in any edition of the poems.djvu/409

Rh A pleasure sweet doubtless it was to see Mortals subdued in all the shapes of sleep. Here lay two sister twins in infancy; There, a lone youth who in his dreams did weep; Within, two lovers linked innocently In their loose locks which over both did creep Like ivy from one stem;—and there lay calm Old age with snow-bright hair and folded palm. But other troubled forms of sleep she saw, Not to be mirrored in a holy song— Distortions foul of supernatural awe, And pale imaginings of visioned wrong; And all the code of Custom's lawless law Written upon the brows of old and young: 'This,' said the wizard maiden, 'is the strife Which stirs the liquid surface of man's life.' And little did the sight disturb her soul.— We, the weak manners of that wide lake Where'er its shores extend or billows roll, Our course unpiloted and starless make O'er its wild surface to an unknown goal:— But she in the calm depths her way could take, Where in bright bowers immortal forms abide Beneath the weltering of the restless tide. And she saw princes couched under the glow Of sunlike gems; and round each temple-court In dormitories ranged, row after row, She saw the priests asleep—all of one sort— For all were educated to be so.— The peasants in their huts, and in the port The sailors she saw cradled on the waves, And the dead lulled within their dreamless graves.

And all the forms in which those spirits lay Were to her sight like the diaphanous Veils, in which those sweet ladies oft array Their delicate limbs, who would conceal from us Only their scorn of all concealment: they Move in the light of their own beauty thus. But these and all now lay with sleep upon them, And little thought a Witch was looking on them.