from Percy Shelley's "Mont Blanc"

       

      3.

      Some say that gleams of a remoter world
      Visit the soul in sleep,--that death is slumber,
      And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
      Of those who wake and live.--I look on high;
      Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled
      The veil of life and death? or do I lie
      In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep
      Spread far around and inaccessibly
      Its circles? For the very spirit fails,
      Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep
      That vanishes among the viewless gales!
      Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,
      Mont Blanc appears,--still, snowy, and serene--
      Its subject mountains their unearthly forms
      Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between
      Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,
      Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread
      And wind among the accumulated steeps;
      A desart peopled by the storms alone,
      Save when the eagle brings some hunter's bone,
      And the wolf tracts her there--how hideously
      Its shapes are heaped around! rude, bare, and high,
      Ghastly, and scarred, and riven.--Is this the scene
      Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young
      Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea
      Of fire, envelope once this silent snow?
      None can reply--all seems eternal now.
      The wilderness has a mysterious tongue
      Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,
      So solemn, so serene, that man may be
      But for such faith with nature reconciled;
      Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal
      Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood
      By all, but which the wise, and great, and good
      Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.

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