HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY. THE awful shadow of some unseen Power This various world with as inconstant wing It visits with inconstant glance Each human heart and countenance; Like clouds in starlight widely spread, Like aught that for its grace may be Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon Of human thought or form, where art thou gone? Why dost thou pass away and leave our state, This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate Ask why the sunlight not for ever Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain river; Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown Why fear and dream and death and birth Cast on the daylight of this earth Such gloom; why man has such a scope For love and hate, despondency and hope. No voice from some sublimer world hath ever Remain the records of their vain endeavor; to sever, From all we hear and all we see, Doubt, chance, and mutability. Thy light alone, like mist o'er mountains driven, Through strings of some still instrument, Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream. Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds, depart And come, for some uncertain moments lent. Man were immortal and omnipotent, Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art, Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart. Thou messenger of sympathies That wax and wane in lovers' eyes; Like darkness to a dying flame! Depart not as thy shadow came; Depart not, lest the grave should be, Like life and fear, a dark reality. While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped I was not heard, I saw them not; When musing deeply on the lot Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing Sudden, thy shadow fell on me ; I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy! 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 day becomes more solemn and serene When noon is past: there is a harmony In autumn, and a lustre in its sky, Which thro' the summer is not heard nor seen, As if it could not be, as if it had not been ! Thus let thy power, which like the truth Of nature on my passive youth Descended, to my onward life supply Its calm, to one who worships thee, And every form containing thee, Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind To fear himself, and love all human kind. MONT BLANC. LINES WRITTEN IN THE VALE OF CHAMOUNI. I. THE everlasting universe of things Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, In the wild woods, among the mountains lone, Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river II. Thus thou, Ravine of Arve-dark, deep RavineThou many-coloured, many-voiced vale, Over whose pines and crags and caverns sail Fast clouds, shadows, and sunbeams; awful scene, 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, The chainless winds still come and ever came Thine earthly rainbows stretched across the Of the ethereal waterfall, whose veil sweep Robes some unsculptured image; the strange sleep Which, when the voices of the desert fail, |