| There was a Being whom my spirit oft |
| Met on its visioned wanderings, far aloft, |
| In the clear golden prime of my youth’s dawn, |
| Upon the fairy isles of sunny lawn, |
| Amid the enchanted mountains, and the caves |
| Of divine sleep, and on the air-like waves |
| Of wonder-level dream, whose tremulous floor |
| Paved her light steps;—on an imagined shore, |
| Under the gray beak of some promontory |
| She met me, robed in such exceeding glory, |
| That I beheld her not. In solitudes |
| Her voice came to me through the whispering woods, |
| And from the fountains, and the odours deep |
| Of flowers, which, like lips murmuring in their sleep |
| Of the sweet kisses which had lulled them there, |
| Breathed but of her to the enamoured air; |
| And from the breezes whether low or loud, |
| And from the rain of every passing cloud, |
| And from the singing of the summer birds, |
| And from all sounds, all silence. In the words |
| Of antique verse and high romance,—in form, |
| Sound, colour—in whatever checks that Storm |
| Which with the shattered present chokes the past; |
| And in that best philosophy, whose taste |
| Makes this cold common hell, our life, a doom |
| As glorious as a fiery martyrdom; |
| Her Spirit was the harmony of truth.— |
| Then, from the caverns of my dreamy youth |
| I sprang, as one sandalled with plumes of fire, |
| And towards the loadstar of my one desire, |
| I flitted, like a dizzy moth, whose flight |
| Is as a dead leaf’s in the owlet light, |
| When it would seek in Hesper’s setting sphere |
| A radiant death, a fiery sepulchre, |
| As if it were a lamp of earthly flame.— |
| But She, whom prayers or tears then could not tame, |
| Passed, like a God throned on a wingèd planet, |
| Whose burning plumes to tenfold swiftness fan it, |
| Into the dreary cone of our life’s shade; |
| And as a man with mighty loss dismayed, |
| I would have followed, though the grave between |
| Yawned like a gulf whose spectres are unseen: |
| When a voice said:—‘O Thou of hearts the weakest, |
| The phantom is beside thee whom thou seekest.’ |
— Percy Bysshe Shelley taken from Epipsychidion
