Filled the unbounded atmosphere, and drank Wan moonlight even to fulness: not a star Shone, not a sound was heard; the very winds, Danger's grim playmates, on that precipice Slept, clasped in his embrace.-O, storm of death! Whose sightless speed divides this sullen night: And thou, colossal Skeleton, that, still Guiding its irresistible career In thy devastating omnipotence, Art king of this frail world, from the red field Of slaughter, from the reeking hospital, The patriot's sacred couch, the snowy bed Diffused and motionless, on the smooth brink Of that obscurest chasm;-and thus he lay, Surrendering to their final impulses The hovering powers of life. Hope and despair, The torturers, slept; no mortal pain or fear Marred his repose, the influxes of sense, And his own being unalloyed by pain, Yet feebler and more feeble, calmly fed The stream of thought, till he lay breathing there At peace, and faintly smiling:-his last sight Was the great moon, which o'er the western line Of the wide world her mighty horn suspended, With whose dun beams inwoven darkness seemed To mingle. Now upon the jagged hills And when two lessening points of light alone Gleamed through the darkness, the alternate gasp Of his faint respiration scarce did stir The stagnate night-till the minutest O. for Medea's wondrous alchemy, Which wheresoe'er it fell made the eart gleam With bright flowers, and the wintry boughs exhale From vernal blooms fresh fragrance O, that God, Profuse of poisons, would concede the chalice Which but one living man has drained who now Vessel of deathless wrath, a slave that feels No proud exemption in the blighting curse He bears, over the world wanders for ever, Lone as incarnate death! O, that the dream Of dark magician in his visioned cave, Raking the cinders of a crucible For life and power, even when his feeble hand Shakes in its last decay, were the true law Of this so lovely world! But thou art fled Like some frail exhalation; which the dawn Robes in its golden beams,-ah! thou hast fled! The brave, the gentle, and the beautiful. The child of grace and genius. Heartless things Are done and said i' the world, and groans, The passionate tumult of a clinging hope; But pale despair and cold tranquillity, Nature's vast frame, the web of human things, Birth and the grave, that are not as they were. 1 1815. March, 1816. None of Shelley's poems is more charactertie than this. The solemn spirit that reigns throughout, the worship of the majesty of nature, the broodings of a poet's heart in solitude -the mingling of the exulting joy which the various aspects of the visible universe inspires with the sad and struggling pangs which human passion imparts-give a touching interest to the *hole. The death which he had often contemplated during the last months as certain and ear he here represented in such colors as had, In his lonely musings, soothed his soul to peace. The versification sustains the solemn spirit which breathes throughout: it is peculiarly melodious. The poem ought rather to be condered didactic than narrative: it was the outpouring of his own emotions, embodied in the purest form he could conceive, painted in the deal hues which his brilliant imagination inpared, and softened by the recent anticipation death. (Mrs. Shelley's note.) The deeper meaning of Alastor is to be found, Tot in the thought of death nor in the poet's recent communings with nature, but in the hotto from St. Augustine placed upon its titleze, and in the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, posed about a year later. Enamored of al loveliness, the poet pursues his vision hrough the universe, vainly hoping to assuage The thirst which has been stimulated in his pirit, and vainly longing for some mortal realization of his love. Alastor, like Epipsychidion, reveals the mistake which Shelley made in inking that the idea of beauty could become Darnate for him in any earthly form: while Hymn to Intellectual Beauty recognizes the truth that such realization of the ideal is imsible. The very last letter written by Shelley the misconception in its proper light: "I think one is always in love with something or HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL ✓ BEAUTY I THE awful shadow of some unseen Power Floats tho' unseen amongst 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 While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped Thro' 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 the 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 Yow? It 1 Mont Blanc was inspired by a view of that mountain and its surrounding peaks and valleys, as he lingered on the Bridge of Arve on his way through the Valley of Chamouni. Shelley makes the following mention of this poem in his publication of the History of a Six Weeks' Tour. and Letters from Switzerland: "The poem entitled Mont Blanc is written by the author of the two letters from Chamouni and Vevai was composed under the immediate impression of the deep and powerful feelings excited by the objects which it attempts to describe; and, as an undisciplined overflowing of the soul, rests its claim to approbation on an attempt to imitate the untamable wildness and inaccessible solemnity from which those feelings sprang. (From Mrs. Shelley's Note on the Poems of 1516) Compare Coleridge's Hymn before Sunrise in |