The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Preface.
• Julian and Maddalo; a Conversation.
• The Witch of Atlas.
• Letter to —
• The Triumph of Life.
• Fragments From an Unfinished Drama.
• Prince Athanase: a Fragment.
• Ode to Naples. *
• Marianne’s Dream.
• Mont Blanc. Lines Written In the Vale of Chamouni.
• Miscellaneous Poems.
• On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci, In the Florentine Gallery.
• Song.
• To Constantia, Singing.
• The Fugitives.
• A Lament.
• The Pine Forest of the Cascine, Near Pisa.
• To Night.
• Evening. Ponte a Mare, Pisa.
• Arethusa.
• The Question.
• Lines to an Indian Air.
• Stanzas Written In Dejection, Near Naples.
• Autumn: a Dirge.
• Hymn of Apollo.
• Hymn of Pan.
• The Boat On the Serchio.
• The Zucca. *
• The Two Spirits. an Allegory.
• A Fragment.
• A Bridal Song.
• The Sunset.
• Song, On a Faded Violet.
• Lines to a Critic.
• Good Night.
• To-morrow.
• Death.
• A Lament.
• Love’s Philosophy.
• To E*** V***
• To —
• Lines.
• To William Shelley.
• An Allegory.
• Mutability.
• From the Arabic. an Imitation.
• To —
• Music.
• Lines.
• Death.
• To —
• Passage of the Apennines.
• To Mary —
• The Past.
• Song of a Spirit.
• Liberty.
• To —
• The Isle.
• To —
• Time.
• Lines.
• A Song.
• The World’s Wanderers.
• A Dirge.
• Lines.
• Dirge For the Year.
• Sonnet I.
• Sonnet II. Political Greatness.
• Sonnet III.
• Sonnet IV.
• Fragments.
• Ginevra. *
• Charles the First. Fragments.
• Prince Athanase. Part II.
• Mazenghi. *
• The Woodman and the Nightingale.
• To the Moon.
• Song For Tasso.
• The Waning Moon.
• Epitaph.
• Alastor; Or the Spirit of Solitude.
• Translations.
• Hymn to Mercury. Translated From the Greek of Homer
• The Cyclops; a Satyric Drama.
• Translation From Moschus.
• Scenes From the “magico Prodigioso” of Calderon.
• Scenes From the Faust of GoËthe.

MONT BLANC.

LINES WRITTEN IN THE VALE OF CHAMOUNI.

• • I.

  • The everlasting universe of things
  • Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
  • Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—
  • Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
  • The source of human thought its tribute brings
  • Of waters,—with a sound but half its own,
  • Such as a feeble brook will oft assume
  • In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
  • Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
  • Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
  • Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.

• • II.

  • Thus thou, Ravine of Arve—dark, deep Ravine—
  • Thou many-coloured, many-voiced vale,
  • Over whose pines and crags and caverns sail
  • Fast cloud, shadows, and sunbeams: awful scene,
  • Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down
  • From the ice gulphs that gird his secret throne,
  • Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame
  • Of lightning thro’ the tempest;—thou dost lie,
  • Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging,
  • Children of elder time, in whose devotion
  • The chainless winds still come and ever came
  • To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging
  • To hear—an old and solemn harmony:
  • 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 recals 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,
  • Save when the eagle brings some hunter’s bone,
  • And the wolf tracts 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
  • Branchless and shattered stand; the rocks, drawn down
  • From yon remotest waste, have overthrown
  • The limits of the dead and living world,
  • Never to be reclaimed. The dwelling-place
  • Of insects, beasts, and birds becomes its spoil;
  • Their food and their retreat for ever gone,
  • So much of life and joy is lost. The race
  • Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling
  • Vanish, like smoke before the tempest’s stream,
  • And their place is not known. Below, vast caves
  • Shine in the rushing torrent’s restless gleam,
  • Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling
  • Meet in the vale, and one majestic River,
  • The breath and blood of distant lands, for ever
  • Rolls its loud waters to the ocean waves,
  • Breathes its swift vapours to the circling air.

• • V.

  • Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:—the power is there,
  • The still and solemn power of many sights
  • And many sounds, and much of life and death.
  • In the calm darkness of the moonless nights,
  • In the lone glare of day, the snows descend
  • Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there,
  • Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun,
  • Or the star-beams dart through them:—Winds contend
  • Silently there, and heap the snow with breath
  • Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home
  • The voiceless lightning in these solitudes
  • Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods
  • Over the snow. The secret strength of things
  • Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
  • Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!
  • And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
  • If to the human mind’s imaginings
  • Silence and solitude were vacancy?

Switzerland, June 23, 1816.