Thus thou, Ravine of Arve — dark, deep Ravine — 
Thou many-colour'd, many-voiced vale, 
Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail 
Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams: awful scene, 
Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down 
From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne, 
Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame 
Of lightning through the tempest; — thou dost lie, 
Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging, 
Children of elder time, in whose devotion 
The chainless winds still come and ever came 
To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging 
To hear—an old and solemn harmony; 
Thine earthly rainbows stretch'd across the sweep 
Of the aethereal waterfall, whose veil 
Robes some unsculptur'd image; the strange sleep 
Which when the voices of the desert fail 
Wraps all in its own deep eternity; 
Thy caverns echoing to the Arve's commotion, 
A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame; 
Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion, 
Thou art the path of that unresting sound — 
Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee 
I seem as in a trance sublime and strange 
To muse on my own separate fantasy, 
My own, my human mind, which passively 
Now renders and receives fast influencings, 
Holding an unremitting interchange 
With the clear universe of things around; 
One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings 
Now float above thy darkness, and now rest 
Where that or thou art no unbidden guest, 
In the still cave of the witch Poesy, 
Seeking among the shadows that pass by 
Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee, 
Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast 
From which they fled recalls them, thou art there!