Wondering at all it sees. Before Jove reigned It loved our sister Asia, and it came Each leisure hour to drink the liquid light Out of her eyes, for which it said it thirsted As one bit by a dipsas, and with her
It made its childish confidence, and told her All it had known or seen, for it saw much, Yet idly reasoned what it saw; and called her, For whence it sprung it knew not, nor do I, Mother, dear mother.
THE SPIRIT OF THE EARTH (running to ASIA). Mother, dearest mother;
May I then talk with thee as I was wont? May I then hide my eyes in thy soft arins, After thy looks have made them tired of joy? May I then play beside thee the long noons, When work is none in the bright silent air?
I love thee, gentlest being! and henceforth Can cherish thee unenvied. Speak, I pray: Thy simple talk once solaced, now delights.
Mother, I am grown wiser, though a child Cannot be wise like thee, within this day; And happier too; happier and wiser both. [worms, Thou knowest that toads, and snakes, and loathly And venomous and malicious beasts, and boughs That bore ill berries in the woods, were ever A hindrance to my walks o'er the green world: And that, among the haunts of humankind, Hard-featured men, or with proud, angry looks, Or cold, staid gait, or false and hollow smiles, Or the dull sneer of self-loved ignorance, Or other such foul masks, with which ill thoughts Hide that fair being whom we spirits call man; And women too, ugliest of all things evil, (Though fair, even in a world where thou art fair, When good and kind, free and sincere like thee), When false or frowning made me sick at heart To pass them, though they slept, and I unseen. Well, my path lately lay through a great city Into the woody hills surrounding it: A sentinel was sleeping at the gate: When there was heard a sound, so loud, it shook The towers amid the moonlight, yet more sweet Than any voice but thine, sweetest of all; A long, long sound, as it would never end: And all the inhabitants leapt suddenly Out of their rest, and gathered in the streets, Looking in wonder up to Heaven, while yet The music pealed along. I hid myself Within a fountain in the public square, Where I lay like the reflex of the moon Seen in a wave under green leaves; and soon Those ugly human shapes and visages Of which I spoke as having wrought me pain, Past floating through the air, and fading still Into the winds that scattered them; and those From whom they past seemed mild and lovely forms After some foul disguise had fallen, and all Were somewhat changed, and after brief surprise And greetings of delighted wonder, all Went to their sleep again: and when the dawn Came, wouldst thou think that toads, and snakes, Could e'er be beautiful? yet so they were, [and efts, And that with little change of shape or hue: All things had put their evil nature off:
I cannot tell my joy, when o'er a lake Upon a drooping bough with nightshade twined, I saw two azure halcyons clinging downward And thinning one bright bunch of amber berries, With quick long beaks, and in the deep there lay Those lovely forms imaged as in a sky;
So with my thoughts full of these happy changes, We meet again, the happiest change of all.
And never will we part, till thy chaste sister Who guides the frozen and inconstant moon Will look on thy more warm and equal light Till her heart thaw like flakes of April snow, And love thee.
SPIRIT OF THE EARTH.
What! as Asia loves Prometheus?
Peace, wanton! thou art yet not old enough. Think ye by gazing on each other's eyes To multiply your lovely selves, and fill With sphered fires the interlunar air?
Nay, mother, while my sister trims her lamp "Tis hard I should go darkling.
The SPIRIT OF THE HOUR enters.
We feel what thou hast heard and seen: yet speak.
Soon as the sound had ceased whose thunder filled The abysses of the sky and the wide earth, There was a change: the impalpable thin air And the all-circling sunlight were transformed, As if the sense of love, dissolved in them, Had folded itself round the sphered world. My vision then grew clear, and I could see Into the mysteries of the universe: Dizzy as with delight I floated down, Winnowing the lightsome air with languid plumes, My coursers sought their birth-place in the sun, Where they henceforth will live exempt from toil, Pasturing flowers of vegetable fire.
And where my moonlike car will stand within A temple, gazed upon by Phidian forms Of thee, and Asia, and the Earth, and me, And you fair nymphs, looking the love we feel; In memory of the tidings it has borne ; Beneath a dome fretted with graven flowers, Poised on twelve columns of resplendent stone, And open to the bright and liquid sky. Yoked to it by an amphisbaenie snake The likeness of those winged steeds will mock The flight from which they find repose. Whither has wandered now my partial tongue When all remains untold which ye would hear? As I have said, I floated to the earth: It was, as it is still, the pain of bliss To move, to breathe, to be; I wandering went Among the haunts and dwellings of mankind, And first was disappointed not to see Such mighty change, as I had felt within, Expressed in outward things; but soon I looked, And behold, thrones were kingless, and men walked One with the other even as spirits do,
None fawned, none trampled; hate, disdain, or fear Self-love or self-contempt, on human brows No more inscribed, as o'er the gate of hell, "All hope abandon ye who enter here;" None frown'd, none trembled, none with eager fear Gazed on another's eye of cold command, Until the subject of a tyrant's will Became, worse fate, the abject of his own, Which spurred him, like an outspent horse, to death. None wrought his lips in truth-entangling lines Which smiled the lie his tongue disdained to speak; None, with firm sneer, trod out in his own heart The sparks of love and hope till there remained Those bitter ashes, a soul self-consumed, And the wretch crept a vampire among men, Infecting all with his own hideous ill; None talked that common, false, cold, hollow talk Which makes the heart deny the yes it breathes, Yet question that unmeant hypocrisy With such a self-mistrust as has no name. And women, too, frank, beautiful, and kind As the free heaven which rains fresh light and dew On the wide earth, past; gentle radiant forms, From custom's evil taint exempt and pure; Speaking the wisdom once they could not think, Looking emotions once they feared to feel, And changed to all which once they dared not be, Yet being now, made earth like heaven; nor pride, Nor jealousy, nor envy, nor ill-shame, The bitterest of those drops of treasured gall, Spoilt the sweet taste of the nepenthe, love.
Thrones, altars, judgment seats, and prisons; wherein,
And beside which, by wretched men were borne Sceptres, tiaras, swords, and chains, and tomes Of reasoned wrong, glozed on by ignorance, Were like those monstrous and barbaric shapes,
The ghosts of a no more remembered fame, Which, from their unworn obelisks, look forth In triumph o'er the palaces and tombs [round Of those who were their conquerors: mouldering Those imaged to the pride of kings and priests, A dark yet mighty faith, a power as wide As is the world it wasted, and are now But an astonishment; even so the tools And emblems of its last captivity,
Amid the dwellings of the peopled earth, Stand, not o'erthrown, but unregarded now. And those foul shapes, abhorred by god and man, Which, under many a name and many a form, Strange, savage, ghastly, dark, and execrable, Were Jupiter, the tyrant of the world; And which the nations, panic-stricken, served With blood, and hearts broken by long hope, and Dragged to his altars soiled and garlandless, [love And slain among men's unreclaiming tears, [hate, Flattering the thing they feared, which fear was Frown, mouldering fast, o'er their abandoned
The painted veil, by those who were, called life, Which mimick'd, as with colours idly spread, All men believed and hoped, is torn aside; The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless, Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king Over himself; just, gentle, wise: but man Passionless; no, yet free from guilt or pain, Which were, for his will made or suffered them, Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves, From chance, and death, and mutability, The clogs of that which else might oversoar The loftiest star of unascended heaven, Pinnacled dim in the intense inane.
We'll pass the eyes
Of the starry skies
Into the hoar deep to colonize:
Death, Chaos, and Night,
From the sound of our flight,
Shall flee, like mist from a tempest's might.
And Earth, Air, and Light, And the Spirit of Might,
Which drives round the stars in their fiery flight; And Love, Thought, and Breath, The powers that quell Death,
Wherever we soar shall assemble beneath.
And our singing shall build
In the void's loose field
A world for the Spirit of Wisdom to wield; We will take our plan
From the new world of man
And our work shall be called the Promethean.
But see where, through two openings in the forest Which hanging branches overcanopy,
And where two runnels of a rivulet,
Between the close moss, violet inwoven, Have made their path of melody, like sisters Who part with sighs that they may meet in smiles, Turning their dear disunion to an isle
Of lovely grief, a wood of sweet sad thoughts; Two visions of strange radiance float upon The ocean-like enchantment of strong sound, Which flows intenser, keener, deeper yet Under the ground and through the windless air.
I see a chariot like that thinnest boat In which the mother of the months is borne By ebbing night into her western cave, When she upsprings from interlunar dreams, O'er which is curbed an orblike canopy Of gentle darkness, and the hills and woods Distinctly seen through that dusk airy veil, Regard like shapes in an enchanter's glass; Its wheels are solid clouds, azure and gold, Such as the genii of the thunder-storm Pile on the floor of the illumined sea When the sun rushes under it; they roll And move and grow as with an inward wind; Within it sits a winged infant, white
Its countenance, like the whiteness of bright snow, Its plumes are as feathers of sunny frost, Its limbs gleam white, through the wind-flowing folds
Of its white robe, woof of ætherial pearl. Its hair is white, the brightness of white light Scattered in strings; yet its two eyes are heavens Of liquid darkness, which the Deity Within seems pouring, as a storm is poured From jagged clouds, out of their arrowy lashes, Tempering the cold and radiant air around, With fire that is not brightness; in its hand It sways a quivering moon-beam, from whose point
A guiding power directs the chariot's prow Over its wheeled clouds, which as they roll Over the grass, and flowers, and waves, wake sounds, Sweet as a singing rain of silver dew.
And from the other opening in the wood Rushes, with loud and whirlwind harmony, A sphere, which is as many thousand spheres, Solid as crystal, yet through all its mass Flow, as through empty space, music and light: Ten thousand orbs involving and involved, Purple and azure, white, green and golden, Sphere within sphere; and every space between Peopled with unimaginable shapes,
Such as ghosts dream dwell in the lampless deep, Yet each inter-transpicuous, and they whirl Over each other with a thousand motions, Upon a thousand sightless axles spinning, And with the force of self-destroying swiftness, Intensely, slowly, solemnly, roll on,
Kindling with mingled sounds, and many tones, Intelligible words and music wild.
With mighty whirl the multitudinous orb Grinds the bright brook into an azure mist Of elemental subtlety, like light; And the wild odour of the forest flowers, The music of the living grass and air, The emerald light of leaf-entangled beams Round its intense yet self-conflicting speed, Seem kneaded into one aërial mass
Which drowns the sense. Within the orb itself, Pillowed upon its alabaster arms,
Like to a child o'erwearied with sweet toil, On its own folded wings, and wavy hair, The Spirit of the Earth is laid asleep, And you can see its little lips are moving, Amid the changing light of their own smiles, Like one who talks of what he loves in dream.
'Tis only mocking the orb's harmony.
And from a star upon its forehead, shoot, Like swords of azure fire, or golden spears With tyrant-quelling myrtle overtwined, Embleming heaven and earth united now, Vast beams like spokes of some invisible wheel Which whirl as the orb whirls, swifter than thought, Filling the abyss with sun-like lightnings, And perpendicular now, and now transverse, Pierce the dark soil, and as they pierce and pass, Make bare the secrets of the earth's deep heart; Infinite mine of adamant and gold, Valueless stones, and unimagined gems, And caverns on crystalline columns poised With vegetable silver overspread ;
Wells of unfathomed fire, and water springs Whence the great sea, even as a child is fed, [tops Whose vapours clothe earth's monarch mountain- With kingly, ermine snow. The beams flash on And make appear the melancholy ruins
Of cancelled cycles; anchors, beaks of ships; Planks turned to marble; quivers, helms, and spears, And gorgon-headed targes, and the wheels Of scythed chariots, and the emblazonry Of trophies, standards, and armorial beasts, Round which death laughed, sepulchred emblems Of dead destruction, ruin within ruin! The wrecks beside of many a city vast,
Whose population which the earth grew over Was mortal, but not human; see, they lie Their monstrous works, and uncouth skeletons, Their statues, homes and fanes; prodigious shapes Huddled in grey annihilation, split,
Jammed in the hard, black deep; and over these, The anatomies of unknown winged things, And fishes which were isles of living scale, And serpents, bony chains, twisted around The iron crags, or within heaps of dust
To which the tortuous strength of their last pangs Had crushed the iron crags; and over these The jagged alligator, and the might Of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once And weed-overgrown continents of earth, Were monarch beasts, and on the slimy shores, Increased and multiplied like summer worms On an abandoned corpse, till the blue globe Wrapt deluge round it like a cloke, and they Yelled, gasped, and were abolished; or some God Whose throne was in a comet, past, and cried, Be not ! And like my words they were no more.
The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness! The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness, The vaporous exultation not to be confined! Ha ha! the animation of delight Which wraps me, like an atmosphere of light, And bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind.
Brother mine, calm wanderer, Happy globe of land and air,
Some Spirit is darted like a beam from thee, Which penetrates my frozen frame,
And passes with the warmth of flame, With love, and odour, and deep melody Through me, through me!
Ha ha! the caverns of my hollow mountains, My cloven fire-crags, sound-exulting fountains, Laugh with a vast and inextinguishable laughter. The oceans, and the deserts, and the abysses, And the deep air's unmeasured wildernesses, Answer from all their clouds and billows, echoing after.
They cry aloud as I do. Sceptred curse, Who all our green and azure universe Threatenedst to muffle round with black destruction, sending
A solid cloud to rain hot thunder-stones,
And splinter and knead down my children's bones, All I bring forth, to one void mass battering and blending.
Until each crag-like tower, and storied column, Palace, and obelisk, and temple solemn, My imperial mountains crowned with cloud, and snow, and fire;
My sea-like forests, every blade and blossom Which finds a grave or cradle in my bosom, Were stamped by thy strong hate into a lifeless mire.
How art thou sunk,withdrawn, covered, drunk up By thirsty nothing, as the brackish cup Drained by a desert-troop, a little drop for all; And from beneath, around, within, above, Filling thy void annihilation, love [ball. Bursts in like light on caves cloven by the thunder
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