The flood of ages combating below,
The depth of the unbounded universe
Above, and all around
Nature's unchanging harmony.
"O happy Earth! reality of Heaven!
"Genius has seen thee in her passionate dreams; And dim forebodings of thy loveliness,
Haunting the human heart, have there entwined
Those rooted hopes that the proud Power of Evil
Shall not forever on this fairest world
Shake pestilence and war, or that his slaves,
With blasphemy for prayer, and human blood
For sacrifice, before his shrine forever
In adoration bend, or Erebus
With all his banded fiends shall not uprise
To overwhelm in envy and revenge
The dauntless and the good who dare to hurl
Defiance at his throne, girt though it be
With death's omnipotence. Thou hast beheld
His empire o'er the present and the past;
It was a desolate sight: now gaze on mine,
Futurity. Thou hoary giant Time,
Render thou up thy half-devoured babes,
And from the cradles of Eternity,
Where millions lie lulled to their portioned sleep
By the deep murmuring stream of passing things Tear thou that gloomy shroud-Spirit, behold Thy glorious destiny."
The vast frame of the renovated world
Smile in the lap of chaos, and the sense
Of hope through her fine texture did suffuse
Such varying glow as summer evening casts
On undulating clouds and deepening lakes.
Like the vague sighings of a wind at even,
That wakes the wavelets of the slumbering sea,
And dies on the creation of its breath,
And sinks and rises, fails and swells, by fits,
Was the sweet stream of thought that with mild motion
Flowed o'er the Spirit's human sympathies.
The mighty tide of thought had paused awhile,
Which from the Dæmon now like ocean's stream
Again began to pour.
The wonders of the human world to keep.
"The vast tract of the parched and sandy waste
Now teams with countless rills and shady woods,
Cornfields and pastures and white cottages.
And, where the startled wilderness did hear
A savage conqueror, stained in kindred blood,
Hymning his victory, or the milder snake
Crushing the bones of some frail antelope
Within his brazen folds, the dewy lawn,
Offering sweet incense to the sunrise, smiles
To see a babe before his mother's door
Share with the green and golden basilisk,
That comes to lick his feet, his morning's meal.
"And man, once fleeting o'er the transient scene
Swift as an unremembered vision, stands
Immortal upon earth. No longer now
He slays the beast that sports around his dwelling,
And horribly devours its mangled flesh,
Or drinks its vital blood which like a stream
Of poison through his fevered veins did flow,
Feeding a plague that secretly consumed
His feeble frame, and kindling in his mind
Hatred, despair, and fear, and vain belief,
The germs of misery, death, disease, and crime.
"Mild is the slow necessity of death.
The tranquil spirit fails beneath its grasp,
Without a groan, almost without a fear,
Resigned in peace to the necessity,
Calm as a voyager to some distant land,
And full of wonder, full of hope, as he.
The deadly germs of languor and disease
Waste in the human frame, and Nature gifts
With choicest boons her human worshipers.
"How lovely the intrepid front of youth! How sweet the smiles of taintless infancy!
"The fanes of Fear and Falsehood hear no more
The voice that once waked multitudes to war Thundering through all their aisles, but now respond To the death-dirge of the melancholy wind.
It were a sight of awfulness to see
The works of faith and slavery—so vast,
So sumptuous, yet withal so perishing!
"Let virtue teach thee firmly to pursue
The gradual paths of an aspiring change:
For birth and life and death, and that strange state
Before the naked powers that through the world
Wander like winds have found a human home,
All tend to perfect happiness, and urge
The restless wheels of being on their way,
Whose flashing spokes, instinct with infinite life,
Bicker and burn to gain their destined goal:
For birth but wakes the universal mind,
Whose mighty streams might else in silence flow
Through the vast world, to individual sense
Of outward shows, whose unexperienced shape
New modes of passion to its frame may lend.
"Fear not then, Spirit, Death's disrobing hand—
So welcome when the tyrant is awake,
So welcome when the bigot's hell-torch flares;
'Tis but the voyage of a darksome hour,
The transient gulf-dream of a startling sleep.
For what thou art shall perish utterly,
But what is thine may never cease to be.
Death is no foe to virtue: earth has seen
Love's brightest roses on the scaffold bloom,
Mingling with freedom's fadeless laurels there,
And presaging the truth of visioned bliss.
Are there not hopes within thee which this scene
Of linked and gradual being has confirmed?
Hopes that not vainly thou, and living fires
Of mind as radiant and as pure as thou,
Have shone upon the paths of men ?—Return,
Surpassing Spirit, to that world where thou
Art destined an eternal war to wage
With tyranny and falsehood, and uproot
The germs of misery from the human heart.
Go, happy one, and give that bosom joy
Whose sleepless spirit waits to catch
Light, life, and rapture, from thy smile."
The Dæmon called its wingèd ministers.
Speechless with bliss, the Spirit mounts the car
That rolled beside the crystal battlement,
Bending her beamy eyes in thankfulness.
The burning wheels inflame
The steep descent of heaven's untrodden way.
Fast and far the chariot flew.
The mighty globes that rolled
Around the gate of the Eternal Fane
Lessened by slow degrees, and soon appeared
Such tiny twinklers as the planet-orbs
That, ministering on the solar power,
With borrowed light pursued their narrower way. Earth floated then below.
The chariot paused a moment :
The Spirit then descended ;
And, from the earth departing,
The shadows with swift wings
Speeded like thought upon the light of Heaven.
The Body and the Soul united then.
A gentle start convulsed Ianthe's frame;
Her veiny eyelids quietly unclosed.
Moveless awhile the dark-blue orbs remained;
She looked around in wonder-and beheld
Henry, who kneeled in silence by her couch,
Watching her sleep with looks of speechless love,
And the bright beaming stars
That through the casement shone.
(A CANCELLED PASSAGE OF THE POEM.)
THERE is a voice, not understood by all,
Sent from these desert caves.
Of the rent ice-cliffs which the sunbeams call,
Plunging into the vale; it is the blast
Descending on the pines.
My spirit like a charmèd barque doth swim,
Upon the liquid waves of thy sweet singing,
Far away into the regions dim
Of rapture—as a boat with swift sails winging
Its way adown some many-winding river.
A HATE-SONG.
(IMPROVISED.)
A HATER he came and sat by a ditch,
And he took out an old cracked lute;
And he sang a song which was more of a screech 'Gainst a woman that was a brute.
TO WILLIAM SHELLEY.
(CANCELLED PASSAGES OF THAT POEM, p. 28.)
THE world is now our dwelling-place :
Where'er the earth one fading trace
Of what was great and free does keep,
That is our home.
|