7.
The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past—there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which thro' the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply
Its calm—to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,[1]
Whom, Spirit fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind.
- ↑ The repetition here of the word thee, instead of finding a rhyme, is highly significant of deliberate intention, and certainly tends to confirm the view expressed in some of the notes on analogous and similar instances throughout Laon and Cythna, that it is not safe to regard such cases as "metric irregularities." In this case there could have been no possible difficulty (as there sometimes would be in the complex stanzas of Laon and Cythna); and I should look upon it as almost certain that here, at all events, the repetition of the word was well considered with regard to effect.
more, extraordinary and eccentric." In reading this beside the two stanzas in the Hymn, allowance must of course be made for the difference between a poet's conception of incidents in his sensitive and persecuted boyhood, and another man's conception of those same incidents as seen by a schoolfellow, who probably, like most of the schoolfellows that any of us can recall, would have no sympathy whatever with a boy like Shelley. The dryly recorded fact that he wrote "verse, English and Latin, with considerable facility," is probably the best corroborative evidence we can get of that vowed service to the spirit of Intellectual Beauty recorded by the poet in the words
I vowed that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and thine.
