343 This world is the nurse of all we know, When all that we know, or feel, or see, The secret things of the grave are there, 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 Dissolve away in wisdom-working grief. 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, |