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Moments from Shelley …
Like moon beams that behind some piny mountain shower,
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening,-
Like clouds in starlight widely spread,-
Like memory of music fled …
From Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, 1817
Dizzy Ravine! - and when I gaze on thee
I seem as in a trance sublime and strange
To muse on my own separate phantasy,
My own, my human mind, which passively
Now renders and receives fast influencings,
Holding an unremitting interchange
With the clear universe of things around …
From Mont Blanc, 1817
This ride was my delight. - I love all waste
And solitary places; where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be:
And such was this wide ocean …
… And then - as if the Earth and Sea had been
Dissolved into one lake of fire, were seen
Those mountains towering as from waves of flame
Around the vaporous sun, from which there came
The inmost purple spirit of light, and made
Their very peaks transparent …
From Julian and Maddalo, 1824
We - are we not formed, as notes of music are,
For one another, though dissimilar;
Such difference without discord, as can make
Those sweetest sounds in which all spirits shake
As trembling leaves in continuous air?
True love in this differs from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away …
Her Spirit was the harmony of truth …
Twin Spheres of light who rule this passive Earth …
… And all their many-mingled influence blend,
If equal, yet unlike, to one sweet end …
Woe is me!
The wingèd words on which my soul would pierce
Into the height of loves rare Universe,
Are chains of lead around its flight of fire …
From Epipsychidion, 1821
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
From Ode to the West Wind, 1820
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