Page:The complete poetical works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, including materials never before printed in any edition of the poems.djvu/641

Rh The Mountain's slumberous voice at intervals Thrill through those roofless halls; The oracular thunder penetrating shook The listening soul in my suspended blood; I felt that Earth out of her deep heart spoke— I felt, but heard not:—through white columns glowed The isle-sustaining ocean-flood, A plane of light between two heavens of azure! Around me gleamed many a bright sepulchre Of whose pure beauty, Time, as if his pleasure Were to spare Death, had never made erasure; But every living lineament was clear As in the sculptor's thought; and there The wreaths of stony myrtle, ivy, and pine, Like winter leaves o'ergrown by moulded snow, Seemed only not to move and grow Because the crystal silence of the air Weighed on their life; even as the Power divine Which then lulled all things, brooded upon mine.

Then gentle winds arose With many a mingled close Of wild Aeolian sound, and mountain-odours keen; And where the Baian ocean Welters with airlike motion, Within, above, around its bowers of starry green, Moving the sea-flowers in those purple caves, Even as the ever stormless atmosphere Floats o'er the Elysian realm, It bore me, like an Angel, o'er the waves Of sunlight, whose swift pinnace of dewy air No storm can overwhelm. I sailed, where ever flows Under the calm Serene A spirit of deep emotion From the unknown graves Of the dead Kings of Melody Shadowy Aornos darkened o'er the helm The horizontal aether; Heaven stripped bare Its depth over Elysium, where the prow Made the invisible water white as snow; From that Typhaean mount, Inarime, There streamed a sunbright vapour, like the standard Of some aethereal host; Whilst from all the coast, Louder and louder, gathering round, there wandered Over the oracular woods and divine sea