TRÜMMELBACH | THUNDER STREAM
Inside the dark heart of the mountain, cold and old and gleaming and indifferent to all outside moments, is a waterfall.
The stones have known that noise, unrelenting, for millennia. Carving the noise into their being; if they spoke, it would be of thunder. Each drop of water is a millisecond, is a grain of sand on the beach, is a star in the sky. The passing water beholds me, and I am almost immortal. But to the stones, I am a slight flutter in the breeze, and no more.
LINES WRITTEN IN THE VALE OF CHAMOUNI
by Percy Bysshe Shelley c. 1816
“The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark - now glittering - now reflecting gloom -
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters - with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume,
In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river,
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.
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.
A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame,
Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion.
Upon that mountain; none beholds them there
The secret Strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind’s imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?
”
