Nature's vast frame, the web of human things,
720 Birth and the grave, that are not as they were.
1815 1816
Mont Blanc1
Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni
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
2. Evening prayer. France. That valley lies at the foot of Mont Blanc, 3. From the last line of Wordsworth's 'Ode: Inti-the highest mountain in the Alps and in all Europe. mations of Immortality': 'Thoughts that do often In the History Percy Shelley commented on his lie too deep for tears.' poem: 'It was composed under the immediate 1. 'Mont Blanc,' in which Shelley both echoes impression of the deep and powerful feelings and argues with the poetry of natural description excited by the objects it attempts to describe; and, written by Wordsworth and Coleridge, was first as an indisciplined overflowing of the soul rests its published as the conclusion to the History of a Six claim to approbation on an attempt to imitate the Weeks' Tour. This was a book that Percy and Mary untamable wildness and inaccessible solemnity Shelley wrote together detailing the excursion that from which those feelings sprang.' He was inspired they and Claire Clairmont took in July 1816 to the to write the poem while standing on a bridge span- valley of Chamonix, in what is now southeastern ning the river Arve, which flows through the valley
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MONT BLANC / 763
5 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 forever,
10 Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
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
is Fast cloud shadows and sunbeams: awfuP scene, awe-inspiringWhere 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 through the tempest;?thou dost lie,
20 Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging, Children of elder0 time, in whose devotion earlier, ancient The chainless winds still come and ever came
To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging
To hear?an old and solemn harmony;
25 Thine earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep
Of the etherial waterfall, whose veil
Robes some unsculptured2 image; the strange sleep
Which when the voices of the desart fail
Wraps all in its own deep eternity;?
30 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
35 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,
