Читать книгу Selected Poetry and Prose - Percy Bysshe Shelley - Страница 46

CHORUS OF SPIRITS

First Spirit

Palace-roof of cloudless nights?

Paradise of golden lights!

Deep, immeasurable, vast,

Which art now, and which wert then!

Of the Present and the Past,

Of the eternal Where and When,

Presence-chamber, temple, home,

Ever-canopying dome,

Of acts and ages yet to come!

Glorious shapes have life in thee—

Earth, and all earth’s company;

Living globes which ever throng

Thy deep chasms and wildernesses;

And green worlds that glide along;

And swift stars with flashing tresses;

And icy moons most cold and bright,

And mighty suns beyond the night,

Atoms of intensest light.

Even thy name is as a god,

Heaven! for thou art the abode

Of that Power which is the glass

Wherein man his nature sees;—

Generations as they pass

Worship thee with bended knees—

Their unremaining gods and they

Like a river roll away:

Thou remainest such—alway!—

Second Spirit

Thou art but the mind’s first chamber,

Round which its young fancies clamber,

Like weak insects in a cave,

Lighted up by stalactites;

But the portal of the grave,

Where a world of new delights

Will make thy best glories seem

But a dim and noonday gleam

From the shadow of a dream!

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!—