Selected Poetry and Prose. Percy Bysshe Shelley

suns, and worlds, and men, and beasts, and flowers,

      With all the silent or tempestuous workings

      By which they have been, are, or cease to be,

      Is but a vision;—all that it inherits

      Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams;

      Thought is its cradle and its grave, nor less

      The Future and the Past are idle shadows

      Of thought’s eternal flight—they have no being.

      Nought is but that which feels itself to be.

      MAHMUD. What meanest thou? Thy words stream like a tempest

      Of dazzling mist within my brain—they shake

      The earth on which I stand, and hang like night

      On Heaven above me. What can they avail?

      They cast on all things surest, brightest, best,

      Doubt, insecurity, astonishment.

      AHASUERUS. Mistake me not! All is contained in each.

      Dodona’s forest to an acorn’s cup

      Is that which has been, or will be, to that

      Which is—the absent to the present. Thought

      Alone, and its quick elements, Will, Passion,

      Reason, Imagination, cannot die;

      They are, what that which they regard appears,

      The stuff whence mutability can weave

      All that it hath dominion o’er, worlds, worms,

      Empires, and superstitions. What has thought

      To do with time, or place, or circumstance?

      Wouldst thou behold the Future?—ask and have!

      Knock and it shall be opened—look, and lo!

      The coming age is shadowed on the Past

      As on a glass.

      MAHMUD. Wild, wilder thoughts convulse

      My spirit—Did not Mahomet the Second

      Win Stamboul?

      AHASUERUS. Thou wouldst ask that giant spirit

      The written fortunes of thy house and faith.

      Thou wouldst cite one out of the grave to tell

      How what was born in blood must die.

      MAHMUD. Thy words

      Have power on me! I see—

      AHASUERUS. What hearest thou?

      MAHMUD. A far whisper—

      Terrible silence.

      AHASUERUS. What succeeds?

      MAHMUD. The sound

      As of the assault of an imperial city,

      The hiss of inextinguishable fire,

      The roar of giant cannon; the earthquaking

      Fall of vast bastions and precipitous towers,

      The shock of crags shot from strange enginery,

      The clash of wheels, and clang of armed hoofs,

      And crash of brazen mail as of the wreck

      Of adamantine mountains—the mad blast

      Of trumpets, and the neigh of raging steeds,

      The shrieks of women whose thrill jars the blood,

      And one sweet laugh, most horrible to hear,

      As of a joyous infant waked and playing

      With its dead mother’s breast, and now more loud

      The mingled battle-cry,—ha! hear I not

      ‘Εν τούτῳ νίκη—’ ‘Allah-illa-Allah!’?

      AHASUERUS. The sulphurous mist is raised—thou seest—

      MAHMUD. A chasm,

      As of two mountains in the wall of Stamboul;

      And in that ghastly breach the Islamites,

      Like giants on the ruins of a world,

      Stand in the light of sunrise. In the dust

      Glimmers a kingless diadem, and one

      Of regal port has cast himself beneath

      The stream of war. Another proudly clad

      In golden arms spurs a Tartarian barb

      Into the gap, and with his iron mace

      Directs the torrent of that tide of men,

      And seems—he is—Mahomet!

      AHASUERUS. What thou seest

      Is but the ghost of thy forgotten dream.

      A dream itself, yet less, perhaps, than that

      Thou call’st reality. Thou mayst behold

      How cities, on which Empire sleeps enthroned,

      Bow their towered crests to mutability.

      Poised by the flood, e’en on the height thou holdest,

      Thou mayst now learn how the full tide of power

      Ebbs to its depths.—Inheritor of glory,

      Conceived in darkness, born in blood, and nourished

      With tears and toil, thou seest the mortal throes

      Of that whose birth was but the same. The Past

      Now stands before thee like an Incarnation

      Of the To-come; yet wouldst thou commune with

      That portion of thyself which was ere thou

      Didst start for this brief race whose crown is death,

      Dissolve with that strong faith and fervent passion

      Which called it from the uncreated deep,

      Yon cloud of war, with its tempestuous phantoms

      Of raging death; and draw with mighty will

      The imperial shade hither.

      [Exit AHASUERUS.]

      [The Phantom of MAHOMET THE SECOND appears.]

      MAHMUD. Approach!

      PHANTOM. I come

      Thence whither thou must go! The grave is fitter

      To take the living than give up the dead;

      Yet has thy faith prevailed, and I am here.

      The heavy fragments of the power which fell

      When I arose, like shapeless crags and clouds,

      Hang round my throne on the abyss, and voices

      Of strange lament soothe my supreme repose,

      Wailing for glory never to return.—

      A later Empire nods in its decay.

      The autumn of a greener faith is come,

      And wolfish change, like winter, howls to strip

      The foliage in which Fame, the eagle, built

      Her aerie, while Dominion whelped below.

      The storm is in its branches, and the frost

      Is on its leaves, and the blank deep expects

      Oblivion on