I sift the snow on the mountains below,
  And their great pines groan aghast,
  And all the night ’tis my pillow white
  While I sleep in the arms of the Blast.... 
  From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape,
  Over a torrent sea,
  Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof,
  The mountains its columns be. 
  The triumphal arch through which I march,
  With hurricane, fire, and snow,
  When the Powers of the air are chained to my chair,
  Is the million-coloured bow;
  The Sphere-fire above its soft colours wove
  While the moist earth was laughing below. 
  I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
  And the nursling of the Sky.

As Brandes puts it; When the cloud sings thus of the moon: 

                                               When
  That orbed maiden with white fire laden,
  Whom Mortals call the Moon,
  Glides glimmering o’er my fleece-like floor
  By the midnight breezes strewn;
  And wherever the beat of her unseen feet,
  Which only the angels hear,
  May have broken the woof of my tent’s thin roof,
  The Stars peep behind her and peer.

or of—­

  The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes,

the reader is carried back, by dint of the virgin freshness of the poet’s imagination, to the time when the phenomena of Nature were first moulded into mythology.

This kinship to the myth is very clear in the finest of all his poems, the Ode to the West Wind, when the poet says to the wind: 

  O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,... 
  Thou on whose stream, ’mid the steep sky’s commotion,
  Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed. 
  Shook from the tangled boughs of heaven and ocean. 
  Angels of rain and lightning, there are spread
  On the blue surface of thine airy surge,
  Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
  Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge
  Of the horizon to the zenith’s height,
  The locks of the approaching storm.

He calls the wind the ‘breath of Autumn’s being,’ the one

  Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
  The winged seeds.

And cries to it: 

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; A wave to pant beneath thy power and share The impulse of thy strength, only less free Than thou, O uncontrollable!... 0 lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!  I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed!  A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed One too like thee, tameless, and swift, and proud.  Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is; What if my leaves are falling like its own?  The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness.  Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit.  Be thou me, impetuous one!  Drive my dead thoughts over the universe, Like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth; And by