[The next book put forth by Shelley after Alastor and other Poems was the little volume containing, among other things, the following poem, and whereof the title runs thus: "History of a Six Weeks' Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland: with Letters descriptive of a Sail Round the Lake of Geneva, and of the Glaciers of Chamouni. London, Published by T. Hookham, Jun. Old Bond Street; and C. and J. Ollier, Welbeck Street. 1817." The History and two of the letters are by Mrs. Shelley,-the rest of the letters, two in number, by Shelley to Peacock. This poem, as well as the Alastor, was included in the volume of Posthumous Poems (1824). In Shelley's preface to the Six Weeks' Tour, it is stated that Mont Blanc "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 untameable wildness and inaccessible solemnity from which those feelings sprang." Mrs. Shelley says the poem was inspired by the view, as Shelley "lingered on the Bridge of Arve on his way through the Vale of Chamouni."—H. B. F.]

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-voicèd vale,
Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail
Fast cloud shadows1 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,

1 In the Posthumous Poems (1824) Mrs. Shelley added a comma at cloud, thus changing the sense: in 1839 she added an 8, thus, Fast clouds, shadows,

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15

&c. I take it Shelley meant cloudshadows, but omitted the hyphen, as he often does in such cases, e. g. in the next line but one, ice gulphs.

Thy1 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 recalls them, thou art there!

III.

Some say that gleams of a remoter world

Visit the soul in sleep,-that death is slumber,

1 The in Mrs. Shelley's editions of 1839.

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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
Spread1 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,

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60

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 tracks her there-how hideously

3

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?

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70

None can reply-all seems eternal now.

The wilderness has a mysterious tongue

Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,

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1

So solemn, so serene, that man may be
But for such faith with nature reconciled;
Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal

Speed in Mrs. Shelley's editions of 1839.

So in Shelley's and all authoritative editions; but I suspect a printer's error for round.

3 Tracts in Shelley's edition. Mr.

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Garnett tells me that in an extant MS., a draft mainly in pencil, this passage stands and the wolf watches her.

4 In the draft mentioned as having been inspected by Mr. Garnett this passage stands In such a faith.

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:

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And this, the naked countenance of earth,

On which I gaze, even these primæval mountains

Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep

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Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains, Slow1 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 2
Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing

1 Mrs. Shelley improves the grammar at the expense of the rhythm, by substituting slowly for slow, in her editions of 1839.

2 Mr. Rossetti substitutes boundary

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of the skies for boundaries of the sky, and secures a bad rhyme between ice and skies, but, as it seems to me, without advantage.