510. The Recollection

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792—1822)

  NOW the last day of many days

  All beautiful and bright as thou,

  The loveliest and the last, is dead:

  Rise, Memory, and write its praise!

  Up, do thy wonted work! come, trace

  The epitaph of glory fled,

  For now the earth has changed its face,

  A frown is on the Heaven’s brow.

  We wander’d to the Pine Forest

  That skirts the Ocean’s foam;

  The lightest wind was in its nest,

  The tempest in its home.

  The whispering waves were half asleep,

  The clouds were gone to play,

  And on the bosom of the deep

  The smile of Heaven lay;

  It seem’d as if the hour were one

  Sent from beyond the skies

  Which scatter’d from above the sun

  A light of Paradise!

  We paused amid the pines that stood

  The giants of the waste,

  Tortured by storms to shape as rude

  As serpents interlaced,—

  And soothed by every azure breath

  That under heaven is blown

  To harmonies and hues beneath,

  As tender as its own:

  Now all the tree-tops lay asleep,

  Like green waves on the sea,

  As still as in the silent deep

  The ocean-woods may be.

  How calm it was!—the silence there

  But such a chain was bound,

  That even the busy woodpecker

  Made stiller by her sound

  The inviolable quietness;

  The breath of peace we drew

  With its soft motion made not less

  The calm that round us grew.

  There seem’d, from the remotest seat

  Of the wide mountain waste

  To the soft flower beneath our feet

  A magic circle traced,

  A spirit interfused around,

  A thrilling silent life;

  To momentary peace it bound

  Our mortal nature’s strife;—

  And still I felt the centre of

  The magic circle there

  Was one fair Form that fill’d with love

  The lifeless atmosphere.

  We paused beside the pools that lie

  Under the forest bough;

  Each seem’d as ’twere a little sky

  Gulf’d in a world below;

  A firmament of purple light

  Which in the dark earth lay,

  More boundless than the depth of night

  And purer than the day—

  In which the lovely forests grew

  As in the upper air,

  More perfect both in shape and hue

  Than any spreading there.

  There lay the glade and neighbouring lawn,

  And through the dark-green wood

  The white sun twinkling like the dawn

  Out of a speckled cloud.

  Sweet views which in our world above

  Can never well be seen

  Were imaged by the water’s love

  Of that fair forest green:

  And all was interfused beneath

  With an Elysian glow,

  An atmosphere without a breath,

  A softer day below.

  Like one beloved, the scene had lent

  To the dark water’s breast

  Its every leaf and lineament

  With more than truth exprest;

  Until an envious wind crept by,

  Like an unwelcome thought

  Which from the mind’s too faithful eye

  Blots one dear image out.

  —Though Thou art ever fair and kind,

  The forests ever green,

  Less oft is peace in Shelley’s mind

  Than calm in waters seen!