Explore "Mont Blanc" by Percy Bysshe Shelley on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The everlasting universe of things / Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, / Now dark-now glittering-now reflecting gloom- / Now lending splendour, where from secret springs / The source of human thought its tribute brings / Of waters,-with a sound but half its own, / Such as a feeble brook will oft assume / In the wild woods, among the mountains lone, / Where waterfalls around it leap for ever, / Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river / Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.
Thus thou, Ravine of Arve-dark, deep Ravine- / Thou many-coloured, 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, / Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame / Of lightning through the tempest; -thou dost lie, / Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging, / Children of elder time, in whose devotion / The chainless winds still come and ever came / To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging / To hear-an old and solemn harmony; / Thine earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep / Of the ethereal waterfall, whose veil / Robes some unsculptured image; the strange sleep / Which when the voices of the desert fail / Wraps all in its own deep eternity; - / Thy caverns echoing to the Arve's commotion, / A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame; / Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion, / Thou art the path of that unresting sound- / Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee / I seem as in a trance sublime and strange / To muse on my own separate fantasy, / My own, my human mind, which passively / Now renders and receives fast influencings, / Holding an unremitting interchange / With the clear universe of things around; / One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings / Now float above thy darkness, and now rest / Where that or thou art no unbidden guest, / In the still cave of the witch Poesy, / Seeking among the shadows that pass by / Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee, / Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast / From which they fled recalls them, thou art there!