Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. IV. The Nineteenth Century: Wordsworth to Rossetti

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)

Extracts from Prometheus Unbound: Semichorus I of Spirits

(See full text.)

(as Asia and Panthea pass into the forest)

THE PATH through which that lovely twain

Have passed, by cedar, pine, and yew,

And each dark tree that ever grew,

Is curtained out from heaven’s wide blue.

Nor sun nor moon nor wind nor rain

Can pierce its interwoven bowers;

Nor aught save where some cloud of dew,

Drifted along the earth-creeping breeze

Between the trunks of the hoar trees,

Hangs each a pearl in the pale flowers

Of the green laurel blown anew,

And bends, and then fades silently,

One frail and fair anemone.

Or, when some star, of many a one

That climbs and wanders through steep night,

Has found the cleft through which alone

Beams fall from high those depths upon,—

Ere it is borne away, away,

By the swift heavens that cannot stay,—

It scatters drops of golden light,

Like lines of rain that ne’er unite:

And the gloom divine is all around,

And underneath is the mossy ground.