the dark stone,

Are the signs of a sceptre that none may disown!

By night or day,

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!

see no more.

The rainbow comes and goes,

And lovely is the rose;

The moon doth with delight

call

My heart is at your festival,

My head hath its coronal,

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.

it all.

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 farther from the

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.

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 forever 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!