Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
An unseen power visits the world like summer winds creeping from flower to flower, inconstant as moonbeams behind mountain rain, and leaves it dark and desolate when it goes; no name in heaven or earth accounts for the coming and going. The speaker recalls a boyhood spent hunting through caves and ruins and starlight woods for ghosts, and the moment the shadow fell across him and he shrieked and clasped his hands in ecstasy. Written on the Lake Geneva tour of 1816 and sent to Leigh Hunt's Examiner, it is the nearest thing Shelley left to a creed.
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