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LINES WRITTEN IN THE VALE OF CHAMOUNI.

 

 1.
 

 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       5
 

 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      10
 

 Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.
 

2.
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, 15
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, 20
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 25
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, 30
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 35
To muse on my own separate fantasy,
My own, my human mind, which passively
Now renders and receives fast influencings,
Holding an unremitting interchange
With the clear universe of things around; 40
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 45
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!

3.
Some say that gleams of a remoter world
Visit the soul in sleep,–that death is slumber, 50
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 55
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, 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 65
And wind among the accumulated steeps;
A desert peopled by the storms alone,
Save when the eagle brings some hunter’s bone,
And the wolf tracts her there–how hideously
Its shapes are heaped around! rude, bare, and high, 70
Ghastly, and scarred, and riven.–Is this the scene
Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young
Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea
Of fire envelope once this silent snow?
None can reply–all seems eternal now. 75
The wilderness has a mysterious tongue
Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,
So solemn, so serene, that man may be,
But for such faith, with nature reconciled;
Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal 80
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.