Explore "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" by Percy Bysshe Shelley on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The awful shadow of some unseen Power / Floats though unseen among us,-visiting / This various world with as inconstant wing / As summer winds that creep from flower to flower,- / Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower, / It visits with inconstant glance / Each human heart and countenance; / Like hues and harmonies of evening,- / Like clouds in starlight widely spread,- / Like memory of music fled,- / Like aught that for its grace may be / Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.
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?