the glimmer of two eyes
This is an unmistakeable reference to "Alastor," the poem Percy Bysshe
Shelley published in March 1816 a few months before the
excursion to Lake Geneva. The
protagonist of that poem is haunted by the
two eyes of a "veilèd maid" (line 151) of whom he dreamed and
whom he subsequently pursues to the end of his life. As he dies his last
glimpse is of "two lessening points of light [that] / Gleamed through the
darkness" (lines 654-55), an
all-consuming ideal that is the ironic cause of his destruction.
