POEMS OF 1S16. 437 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 I 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 inaccessiblyls Its circles ? for the very spirit faie, Driven like a homeless cloud from step 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 desert peopled by the storms alone, , . Save when the eagle brings some hunter’s bone, And the wolf tracks her there. How hideously Its shapes are heaped around—rude, bare, and high, Ghastly and scarred and riven I—Is this the scene Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young Ruin ? were these their toys ? or did a sea Of fire envelop 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,