Page:The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Volume 2).djvu/134

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shelley's preface to the six weeks' tour, &c.

ing with her down the castled Rhine, through scenes beautiful in themselves, but which, since she visited them, a great Poet has clothed with the freshness of a diviner nature. They will be interested to hear of one who has visited Meillerie,[1] and Clarens, and Chillon, and Vevai—classic ground, peopled with tender and glorious imaginations of the present and the past.

They have perhaps never talked with one who has beheld in the enthusiasm of youth the glaciers, and the lakes, and the forests, and the fountains of the mighty Alps. Such will perhaps forgive the imperfections of their narrative for the sympathy which the adventures and feelings which it recounts, and a curiosity respecting scenes already rendered interesting and illustrious, may excite.

The[2] Poem, entitled "Mont Blanc," is written by the author of the two letters from Chamouni and Vevai. It was composed under the immediate impression of the deep and powerful feelings excited by the objects which it attempts to describe; and as an undisciplined overflowing of the soul, rests its claim to approbation on an attempt to imitate the untameable wildness and inaccessible solemnity from which those feelings sprang.

  1. In Shelley's edition Mellerie, but Meillerie in Mrs. Shelley's.
  2. This paragraph is reprinted in the first edition of the Essays &c. (1840); but in later editions Mrs. Shelley drops it, presumably because it is quoted in her note on the Poems of 1816 in her second edition of the Poetical Works.