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-learned 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

3 "Humorous stage" is stage whereon humours, that is, whims, crotchets, or fancies are displayed. This is the old meaning of humour. So in Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, passim.

Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read'st th' eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by th' 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 th' 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!

4 As the matter is here viewed, the child, from the strength or instinctive action of an inward law, rests in the full conviction or assurance of that truth, namely, the immortality of the soul, which the mature mind is ever struggling to make good by external proof and inference; because the latter, as the stern facts of our condition press upon it, gets lost in the "dark valley;" that is, the grave cuts off from it the vision of a life beyond.

5 The preceding part of this stanza has always been something of a poser to me. I have never been quite able to get over Coleridge's comment upon it: "In what sense is a child of that age a philosopher? In what sense does he read 'th' eternal deep'? In what sense is he declared to be 'for ever haunted by the Supreme Being'? or so inspired as to deserve the titles of a mighty prophet, a blessed seer? By reflec tion? by knowledge? by conscious intuition? or by any form or modification of consciousness? These would be tidings indeed; but such as would presuppose an immediate revelation to the inspired communicator, and require miracles to authenticate his inspiration. But if this be too wild and exorbitant to be suspected as hav ing been the poet's meaning; if these mysterious gifts, faculties, and operations are not accompanied with consciousness, who else is conscious of them? or how can it be called the child, if it be no part of the child's conscious being?" And again: "In what sense can the magnificent attributes, above quoted, be appropriated to a child, which would not make them equally suitable to a bee, or a dog, or a field of corn? or even to a ship, or to the wind and waves that propel it? The omnipresent Spirit works equally in them as in the child; and the child is equally unconscious of it as they." On the other hand, Wordsworth, in his Essay upon Epitaphs, pursues the theme in a high strain of discourse from which I must be content to give a short extract: "Forlorn, and cut off from communication with the best part of his nature, must that man be, who should derive the sense of immortality, as it exists in the mind of a child, from the same unthinking gaiety or liveliness of animal spirits with which the lamb in the meadow, or any other irrational creature is endowed; who should ascribe it, in short, to blank ignorance in the child; to an inability arising from the imperfect state of his faculties to come, in any point of his being, into contact with a notion of death: or to an unreflecting acquiescence in what had been in. stilled into him! Has such an unfolder of the mysteries of nature, though he may have forgotten his former self, ever noticed the early, obstinate, and unappeasable inquisitiveness of children upon the subject of origination? This single fact proves outwardly the monstrousness of those suppositions: for, if we had no direct exter. nal testimony that the minds of very young children meditate feelingly upon death and immortality, these inquiries, which we all know they are perpetually making concerning the whence, do necessarily include corresponding habits of interrogation concerning the whither. Origin and tendency are notions inseparably co-relative. We may, then, be justified in asserting, that the sense of immortality, if not a coexistent and twin birth with Reason, is among the earliest of her offspring: and we may further assert, that from these conjoined, and under their countenance, the human affections are gradually formed and opened out."

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 realised;

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 endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy,

Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!

6 These "questionings of sense and outward things" are, I suppose, the ques. tions which the soul puts to its visible surroundings, ever seeking from them what they have not to give: that is, the soul is so unable to acquiesce in death as the end of its being, that it cannot choose but keep interrogating the world of sense for answers which must come from a higher source; and this is taken as arguing that the soul is itself framed and attuned to a world above and beyond the present. Thus the poet finds cause to rejoice in the moral disappointments he has sustained,-to rejoice that the glories he saw in childhood have fallen away from him, and van. ished under the pressure of experience; because all this is a sort of pledge that his being has in it something greater and better than this world; that the soul's true home is in a world where life is unfailing and death is unknown. And so, in his view, for the purpose in question, the "philosophic mind" more than compensates the loss of the instinctive faith of childhood. Wordsworth here shows that the thought is at least a good one for poetical use; and I think it may be shown to be a good one for practical use. For, in fact, the strongest natural argument for a future life is, that the higher needs and instincts of our moral being are not met in this world: in other words, conscience and the present state of thing do not go together; the one does not answer to the other; and the world is full of beginnings that are to be finished elsewhere, if finished at all. See page 214, note 4.

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,

And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

X.

Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!
And let the young Lambs bound

As to the tabor's sound!
We in thought will join your throng,
Ye that pipe and ye that play,

Ye that through your hearts to-day
Feel the gladness of the May!

What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,

Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy

Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;

In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.

XI.

And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!

Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquish'd one delight

To live beneath your more habitual sway.

I love the Brooks which down their channels fret, Even more than when I tripp'd lightly as they; The innocent brightness of a new-born Day

Is lovely yet;

The Clouds that gather round the setting Sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye

That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality:

Another race hath been, and other palms are won. Thanks to the human heart by which we live, Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

THE PRELUDE,

OR GROWTH OF A POET'S MIND.

[1803-6.

PREFATORY NOTE.-This poem was begun early in 1799, and was finished in the Summer of 1805. During that time, the author, as he himself tells us, was meditating a much larger work, of which The Excursion forms a part; and by way of preparation for this work, "he undertook to record, in verse, the origin and progress of his own powers, so far as he was acquainted with them." And he adds the following: "The preparatory poem is autobiographical, and conducts the history of the author's mind to the point when he was emboldened to hope that his faculties were sufficiently matured for entering upon the arduous labour which he had proposed to himself; and the two works have the same kind of relation to each other, if he may so express himself, as the Ante-chapel has to the body of a Gothic Church."-The Prelude was addressed to Coleridge, who was residing in Malta for the restoration of his health when the greater part of it was composed. On his return to England, Wordsworth read the poem to him; and the impression it made upon him is set forth in some very noble verses addressed to Wordsworth, which will be found among the poems by Coleridge given in this volume. Wordsworth speaks of The Prelude as being "addressed to a dear friend, most distinguished for his knowledge and genius, and to whom the author's intellect is deeply indebted."- The poem was not published till 1850, soon after the author's death. On its first appearance, it was, I think, rather disappointing to the lovers of Wordsworth; but it wears well, and, if my own experience be any test, never fails to improve on further acquaintance.-The whole poem consists of fourteen Books. Of these, I give the first two Books entire, and portions of several others; which is all I can make room for, without excluding other pieces that seem better suited to the purpose of this volume.

BOOK FIRST.

INTRODUCTION-CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOL-TIME.

O, THERE is blessing in this gentle breeze,
A visitant that while it fans my cheek
Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings
From the green fields, and from yon azure sky.
Whate'er its mission, the soft breeze can come
To none more grateful than to me; escaped

7 This great Ode is now commonly accepted as the crowning effort of modern imaginative discourse; but I suspect that few have grown to a full comprehension of its meaning. So deep and strong, indeed, is the undercurrent of thought, and so rich and varied the imagery and expression by which those depths are symbolized, that one may converse with it every day for a lifetime, without exhausting its sig nificance. I must dismiss it with a brief comment from Coleridge: "To the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, the poet might have prefixed the lines which Dante addressed to one of his own Canzoni:

'O lyric song, there will be few, think I,
Who may thy import understand aright;
Thou art for them so arduous and so high!'

But the Ode was intended for such readers only as had been accustomed to watch the flux and reflux of their inmost nature, to venture at times into the twilight realms of consciousness, and to feel a deep interest in modes of inmost being, to which they know that the attributes of time and space are inapplicable and alien, but which yet cannot be conveyed save in symbols of time and space. For such readers the sense is sufficiently plain."