ixing bowls, and
jars of stone full of honey, those delights of the senses, 'sounds of air'
'folded in cells of crystal silences,' 'liquors clear and sweet' 'in
crystal vials,' and for the bees, visions 'each in his thin sheath like a
chrysalis,' and for 'the looms of stone' and 'raiment of purple stain' the
Witch's spinning and embroidering; and the Witch herself is a Naiad, and
was born from one of the Atlantides, who lay in 'a chamber of grey rock'
until she was changed by the sun's embrace into a cloud.

When one turns to Shelley for an explanation of the cave and fountain one
finds how close his thought was to Porphyry's. He looked upon thought as a
condition of life in generation and believed that the reality beyond was
something other than thought. He wrote in his fragment 'On Life,' 'That
the basis of all things cannot be, as the popular philosophy alleges,
mind, is sufficiently evident. Mind, as far as we have any experience of
its properties, and beyond that experience how vain is argument, cannot
create, it can only perceive;' and in another passage he defines mind as
existence. Water is his great symbol of existence, and he continually
meditates over its mysterious source. In his prose he tells how 'thought
can with difficulty visit the intricate and winding chambers which it
inhabits. It is like a river, whose rapid and perpetual stream flows
outward.... The caverns of the mind are obscure and shadowy; or pervaded
with a lustre, beautiful and bright indeed, but shining not beyond their
portals.' When the Witch has passed in her boat from the caverned river,
that is doubtless her own destiny, she passes along the Nile 'by Moeris
and the Mareotid lakes,' and sees all human life shadowed upon its waters
in shadows that 'never are erased but tremble ever'; and in many a dark
and subterranean street under the Nile--new caverns--and along the bank of
the Nile; and as she bends over the unhappy, she compares unhappiness to
'the strife that stirs the liquid surface of man's life'; and because she
can see the reality of things she is described as journeying 'in the calm
depths' of 'the wide lake' we journey over unpiloted. Alastor calls the
river that he follows an image of his mind, and thinks that it will be as
hard to say where his thought will be when he is dead as where its waters
will be in ocean or cloud in a little while. In _Mont Blanc_, a poem so
overladen with descriptions in parentheses that one loses sigh