As in that trance of wondrous thought I lay, This was the tenour of my waking dream:-- Methought I sate beside a public way
Thick strewn with summer dust, and a great stream Of people there was hurrying to and fro, Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam,
All hastening onward, yet none seemed to know Whither he went, or whence he came, or why He made one of the multitude, and so
Was borne amid the crowd, as through the sky One of the million leaves of summer’s bier; Old age and youth, manhood and infancy,
Mixed in one mighty torrent did appear: Some flying from the thing they feared, and some Seeking the object, of another’s fear;
And others, as with steps towards the tomb, Pored on the trodden worms that crawled beneath, And others mournfully within the gloom
Of their own shadow walked and called it death; And some fled from it as it were a ghost, Half fainting in the affliction of vain breath
But more, with motions which each other crossed, Pursued or spurned the shadows the clouds threw, Or birds within the noon-day ether lost,
Upon that path where flowers never grew,-- And weary with vain toil and faint for thirst, Heard not the fountains, whose melodious dew
Out of their mossy cells for ever burst; Nor felt the breeze which from the forest told Of grassy paths, and wood lawn-interspersed,
With over-arching elms, and caverns cold, And violet banks where sweet dreams brood;--but they Pursued their serious folly as of old.
Here let us break the chain of rhymes that are unbroken in the text, to notice the extraordinary skill with which the rhythm has been woven in one paragraph, suggesting by recurrences of sound the passing of a multitude, which is presented at the same time to the eye of fancy by accumulated images. The next eleven triplets introduce the presiding genius of the pageant. Students of Petrarch’s _Trionfi_ will not fail to note what Shelley owes to that poet, and how he has transmuted the definite imagery of mediæval symbolism into something metaphysical and mystic.
And as I gazed, methought that in the way The throng grew wilder, as the woods of June When the south wind shakes the extinguished day;
And a cold glare, intenser than the noon But icy cold, obscured with blinding light The sun, as he the stars. Like the young moon--