Selected Poetry and Prose. Percy Bysshe Shelley

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      Third Spirit

      Peace! the abyss is wreathed with scorn

      At your presumption, atom-born!

      What is Heaven? and what are ye

      Who its brief expanse inherit?

      What are suns and spheres which flee

      With the instinct of that Spirit

      Of which ye are but a part?

      Drops which Nature’s mighty heart

      Drives through thinnest veins! Depart!

      What is Heaven? a globe of dew,

      Filling in the morning new

      Some eyed flower whose young leaves waken

      On an unimagined world:

      Constellated suns unshaken,

      Orbits measureless, are furled

      In that frail and fading sphere,

      With ten millions gathered there,

      To tremble, gleam, and disappear!—

      ODE TO LIBERTY

      Yet, Freedom, yet, thy banner, torn but flying,

      Streams like a thunder-storm against the wind.

      BYRON.

      I.

      A glorious people vibrated again

      The lightning of the nations: Liberty

      From heart to heart, from tower to tower, o’er Spain,

      Scattering contagious fire into the sky,

      Gleamed. My soul spurned the chains of its dismay,

      And in the rapid plumes of song

      Clothed itself, sublime and strong;

      As a young eagle soars the morning clouds among,

      Hovering inverse o’er its accustomed prey;

      Till from its station in the Heaven of fame

      The Spirit’s whirlwind rapped it, and the ray

      Of the remotest sphere of living flame

      Which paves the void was from behind it flung,

      As foam from a ship’s swiftness, when there came

      A voice out of the deep: I will record the same.

      II.

      The Sun and the serenest Moon sprang forth:

      The burning stars of the abyss were hurled

      Into the depths of Heaven. The daedal earth,

      That island in the ocean of the world,

      Hung in its cloud of all-sustaining air:

      But this divinest universe

      Was yet a chaos and a curse,

      For thou wert not: but, power from worst producing worse,

      The spirit of the beasts was kindled there,

      And of the birds, and of the watery forms,

      And there was war among them, and despair

      Within them, raging without truce or terms:

      The bosom of their violated nurse

      Groaned, for beasts warred on beasts, and worms on worms,

      And men on men; each heart was as a hell of storms.

      III.

      Man, the imperial shape, then multiplied

      His generations under the pavilion

      Of the Sun’s throne: palace and pyramid,

      Temple and prison, to many a swarming million

      Were, as to mountain-wolves their ragged caves.

      This human living multitude

      Was savage, cunning, blind, and rude,

      For thou wert not; but o’er the populous solitude,

      Like one fierce cloud over a waste of waves,

      Hung Tyranny; beneath, sate deified

      The sister-pest, congregator of slaves;

      Into the shadow of her pinions wide

      Anarchs and priests, who feed on gold and blood

      Till with the stain their inmost souls are dyed,

      Drove the astonished herds of men from every side.

      IV.

      The nodding promontories, and blue isles,

      And cloud-like mountains, and dividuous waves

      Of Greece, basked glorious in the open smiles

      Of favouring Heaven: from their enchanted caves

      Prophetic echoes flung dim melody.

      On the unapprehensive wild

      The vine, the corn, the olive mild,

      Grew savage yet, to human use unreconciled;

      And, like unfolded flowers beneath the sea,

      Like the man’s thought dark in the infant’s brain,

      Like aught that is which wraps what is to be,

      Art’s deathless dreams lay veiled by many a vein

      Of Parian stone; and, yet a speechless child,

      Verse murmured, and Philosophy did strain

      Her lidless eyes for thee; when o’er the Aegean main

      V.

      Athens arose: a city such as vision

      Builds

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