343

This world is the nurse of all we know,
This world is the mother of all we feel;
And the coming of death is a fearful blow
To a brain unencompassed with nerves of
steel,

When all that we know, or feel, or see,
Shall pass like an unreal mystery.

The secret things of the grave are there,
Where all but this frame must surely be,
Though the fine-wrought eye and the won-
drous ear

No longer will live to hear or to see All that is great and all that is strange In the boundless realm of unending change.

Who telleth a tale of unspeaking death?

Who lifteth the veil of what is to come? Who painteth the shadows that are beneath The wide-winding caves of the peopled tomb?

Or uniteth the hopes of what shall be With the fears and the love for that which we see?

wild,

28

But year by year lived on; in truth I think
Her gentleness and patience and sad smiles,
And that she did not die, but lived to tend
Her aged father, were a kind of madness,
If madness 't is to be unlike the world.
For but to see her were to read the tale
Woven by some subtlest bard to make
hard hearts

Dissolve away in wisdom-working grief.
Her eyes were black and lustreless and wan,
Her eyelashes were worn away with tears,
Her lips and cheeks were like things dead
so pale;

Her hands were thin, and through their wandering veins

40

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.

The poem,' Shelley writes, in his Preface to History of a Six Weeks Tour, 1817, where it appeared, 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.

The, 'objects' referred to, Mrs. Shelley notes, were Mont Blane and its surrounding peaks and valleys, as he lingered on the Bridge of Arve on his way through the Valley of Chamouni.'

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,