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, 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 Thy caverns echoing to the Arve's commotion, 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, thee, Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast From which they fled recalls them, thou are there! III. Some say that gleams of a remoter world number 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 se rene. 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 Save when the eagle brings some hunter's bone, And the wolf tracks her there-how hide ously 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 Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild, 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; |