nance in which there was somewhat of anxiety, somewhat of disdain, and cried, 'Go away! go away! Nothing that thou touchest lives.'

"Say rather, child!' replied the advancing form, and advancing grew loftier and statelier,' say rather that nothing of beautiful or of glorious lives its own true life until my wing hath passed over it.'

"Love pouted, and rumpled and bent down with his forefinger the stiff short feathers on his arrow-head, but replied not. Although he frowned worse than ever, and at me, I dreaded him less and less, and scarcely looked toward him. The milder and calmer genius, the third, in proportion as I took courage to contemplate him, regarded me with more and more complacency. He held neither flower nor arrow, as the others did; but throwing back the clusters of dark curls that overshadowed his countenance, he presented to me his hand, openly and benignly. I shrank on looking at him so near, and yet I sighed to love him. He smiled, not without an expression of pity, at perceiving my diffidence, my timidity; for I remembered how soft was the hand of Sleep, how warm and entrancing was Love's. By degrees I grew ashamed of my ingratitude, and turning my face away, I held out my arms and felt my neck within his. Composure allayed all the throbbings of my bosom, the coolness of freshest morning breathed around, the heavens seemed to open above me, while the beautiful cheek of my deliverer rested on my head. I would now have looked for those others, but, knowing my intention by my gesture, he said consolatorily,

666

"Sleep is on his way to the earth, where many are calling him; but it is not to them he hastens, for every call only makes him fly further off. Sedately and gravely as he looks, he is nearly as capricious and volatile as the more arrogant and ferocious one.'

"And Love,' said I, 'whither is he departed? If not too late I would propitiate and appease him.'

"He who cannot follow me, he who cannot overtake and pass me,' said the genius, 'is unworthy of the name, the most glorious in earth or heaven. Look up! Love is yonder, and ready to receive thee.'

"I looked; the earth was under me; I saw only the clear blue sky, and something brighter above it."

ODE ON INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY FROM RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850).

["In Lycidas (1637) we have reached the high-water mark of English poesy and of Milton's own productions. A period of a century and a half was to elapse before poetry in England seemed in Wordsworth's Ode on Immortality (1807) to be rising again towards the level of inspiration which it had once attained in Lycidas."-MARK PATTISON.]

I.

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore ;-
Turn wheresoe'er I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

II.

The rainbow comes and goes,

And lovely is the rose;

The moon doth with delight

Look round her when the heavens are bare;

Waters on a starry night

Are beautiful and fair;

The sunshine is a glorious birth;

But yet I know, where'er I go,

That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.

III.

Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound

As to the tabor's sound,

To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong.

The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the echoes through the mountains throng;
The winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay;
Land and sea
Give themselves up to jollity,

And with the heart of May
Doth every beast keep holiday.

Thou child of joy,

Shout round me; let me hear thy shouts, thou happy shepherd-boy!

IV.

Ye blessed creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make; I see

The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,
My head hath its coronal,

The fulness of your bliss, I feel-I feel it all.
O evil day if I were sullen
While the Earth herself is adorning
This sweet May morning;

And the children are pulling
On every side,

In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers, while the sun shines warm,
And the babe leaps up on his mother's arm:
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!

But there's a tree, of many one,

A single field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone;
The pansy at my feet

Doth the same tale repeat:

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

V.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar;

Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come,
From God, who is our home.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy;
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows
He sees it in his joy;

The youth, who daily further from the east
Must travel, still is nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

VI.

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind.
And even with something of a mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim,

The homely nurse doth all she can
To make her foster-child, her inmate man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.

VII.

Behold the child among his new-born blisses,
A six-years' darling of a pigmy size!

See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
With light upon him from his father's eyes!
See at his feet some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly learnëd art;
A wedding or a festival,

A mourning or a funeral;

And this hath now his heart,
And unto this he frames his song:
Then will he fit his tongue

To dialogues of business, love, or strife;
But it will not be long

Ere this be thrown aside,

And with new joy and pride

The little actor cons another part;

Filling from time to time his “humorous stage"
With all the persons, down to palsied age,
That Life brings with her in her equipage;
As if his whole vocation

Were endless imitation.

VIII.

Thou whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy soul's immensity;

Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage; thou eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind-
Mighty prophet! seer blest!

On whom those truths do rest
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;
Thou, over whom thy immortality

Broods like the day, a master o'er a slave,

A presence which is not to be put by;
Thou little child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
The years to bring the inevitable yoke,
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?
Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

IX.

O joy! that in our embers

Is something that doth live!
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!

The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction ;-not, indeed,
For that which is most worthy to be blest;
Delight and liberty, the simple creed

Of childhood, whether busy or at rest,

With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast: Not for these I raise

The song of thanks and praise;

But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings-

Blank misgivings of a creature

Moving about in worlds not realized—

High instincts, before which our mortal nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised;
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,

Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence-truths that wake,
To perish never;

Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor,
Nor man nor boy,

Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
Hence, in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea

Which brought us hither,

Can in a moment travel thither,