With haughty scorn which mocked the smart,
135 Through Europe to the Aetolian shore5
The pageant of his bleeding heart?
That thousands counted every groan,
And Europe made his woe her own?
What boots0 it, Shelley! that the breeze avails HO Carried thy lovely wail away,
Musical through Italian trees
Which fringe thy soft blue Spezzian bay?6
Inheritors of thy distress
Have restless hearts one throb the less?
1. It is not clear whether the speaker has resumed 3. Variously but never satisfactorily identified as addressing his 'rigorous teachers' (line 67) or (as John Henry' Newman or Thomas Carlyle (the latter would seem more likely) a combination of the sci-was said to have preached the gospel of silence in olists, who scorn the speaker's melancholy, and the forty volumes). Another advocate of stoical silence worldly, who scorn the faith of the monks. See his was the French poet Alfred de Vigny (1 797-1863). address to the 'sons of the world' (lines 161?68). 4. Predecessors among the Romantic writers such 2. Until the death of Patroclus, he refused to par-as Byron. ticipate in the Trojan War; hence he is similar to 5. Region in Greece where Bvron died. modern intellectual leaders who refuse to speak 6. The Gulf of Spezia in Italy, where Percy Bysshe out about their frustrated sense of alienation. Shelley was drowned.
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STANZAS FROM THE GRANDE CHARTREUSE / 137 3
145 Or are we easier, to have read, O Obermann!7 the sad, stern page,
Which tells us how thou hidd'st thy head
From the fierce tempest of thine age
In the lone brakes0 of Fontainebleau, thickets no Or chalets near the Alpine snow?
Ye slumber in your silent grave!
The world, which for an idle day
Grace to your mood of sadness gave, Long since hath flung her weeds0 away. mourning clothes 155 The eternal trifler8 breaks your spell;
But we?we learnt your lore too well! Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age,
More fortunate, alas! than we,
Which without hardness will be sage,
160 And gay without frivolity. Sons of the world, oh, speed those years;
But, while we wait, allow our tears! Allow them! We admire with awe
The exulting thunder of your race;
165 You give the universe your law,
You triumph over time and space!
Your pride of life, your tireless powers,
We laud them, but they are not ours. We are like children reared in shade
i7o Beneath some old-world abbey wall,
Forgotten in a forest glade,
And secret from the eyes of all.
Deep, deep the greenwood round them waves,
Their abbey, and its close0 of graves! enclosure 175 But, where the road runs near the stream,
Oft through the trees they catch a glance
Of passing troops in the sun's beam?
Pennon, and plume, and flashing lance!
Forth to the world those soldiers fare,
i8o To life, to cities, and to war! And through the wood, another way,
Faint bugle notes from far are borne,
Where hunters gather, staghounds bay,
Round some fair forest-lodge at morn.
185 Gay dames are there, in sylvan green; Laughter and cries?those notes between!
7. Melancholy hero of Obermann (1804), a novel 8. The sciolist, as in line 99. by the French writer Etienne
