Explore "Queen Mab" by Percy Bysshe Shelley on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
THE FAIRY: / ‘The Present and the Past thou hast beheld: / It was a desolate sight. Now, Spirit, learn / The secrets of the Future. -Time! / Unfold the brooding pinion of thy gloom, / 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!'
Joy to the Spirit came. / Through the wide rent in Time's eternal veil, / Hope was seen beaming through the mists of fear: / Earth was no longer Hell; / Love, freedom, health, had given / Their ripeness to the manhood of its prime, / And all its pulses beat / Symphonious to the planetary spheres: / Then dulcet music swelled / Concordant with the life-strings of the soul; / It throbbed in sweet and languid beatings there, / Catching new life from transitory death,- / 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 pure stream of feeling / That sprung from these sweet notes, / And o'er the Spirit's human sympathies / With mild and gentle motion calmly flowed.