Or live, or drop in the deep sea of Love;
Oh, that, like thine, mine epitaph were - Peace!"
This was the only moan she ever made.

HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY

I

THE awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us, visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to

flower;

Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain

shower,

It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;

Like hues and harmonies of evening,

Like clouds in starlight widely spread,
Like memory of music fled,

Like aught that for its grace may be

Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

II

Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate

With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon Of human thought or form, where art thou gone?

This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate? Ask why the sunlight not forever

Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain river;

Why aught should fail and fade that once is

shown;

Why fear and dream and death and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth

Such gloom; why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope.

III

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever To sage or poet these responses given; Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost and

Heaven,

Remain the records of their vain endeavor Frail spells, whose uttered charm might not avail

to sever,

From all we hear and all we see,
Doubt, chance and mutability.

Thy light alone, like mist o'er mountains
driven,

Or music by the night wind sent

Through strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream,

Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.

IV

Love, Hope and Self-esteem, like clouds, depart, And come, for some uncertain moments lent. Man were immortal and omnipotent,

Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,

Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his

heart.

Thou messenger of sympathies

That wax and wane in lovers' eyes!

Thou, that to human thought art nourishment,
Like darkness to a dying flame,
Depart not as thy shadow came!
Depart not, lest the grave should be,
Like life and fear, a dark reality!

While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,

And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing

Hopes of high talk with the departed dead; I called on poisonous names with which our youth

is fed.

I was not heard - I saw them not-
When, musing deeply on the lot

Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing

All vital things that wake to bring
News of birds and blossoming, -
Sudden thy shadow fell on me ;

I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!

VI

I vowed that I would dedicate my powers

To thee and thine - have I not kept the vow?
With beating heart and streaming eyes, even

now

I call the phantoms of a thousand hours Each from his voiceless grave: they have in

visioned bowers

Of studious zeal or love's delight
Outwatched with me the envious night -

They know that never joy illumed my brow
Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free
This world from its dark slavery, -
That thou, O awful Loveliness,

Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot

express.

VII

The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past; there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!

Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth

Descended, to my onward life supply
Its calm,

to one who worships thee,

And every form containing thee,
Whom, Spirit fair, thy spells did bind

To fear himself, and love all humankind.

MONT BLANC

LINES WRITTEN IN THE VALE OF CHAMOUNI

I

The everlasting universe of things

Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,

Mont Blanc. Published in the History of a Six Weeks' Tour, 1817. Composed in Switzerland, in July.

Now dark, now glittering, now reflecting gloom,
Now lending splendor, 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 forever,
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-colored, 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-gulfs that gird his secret throne,
Bursting through these dark mountains like the

flame

Of lightning through 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 odors, 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 desert 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,