That Poets, even as Prophets, each with each
Connected in a mighty scheme of truth,
Have each his own peculiar faculty,

Heaven's gift, a sense that fits him to perceive
Objects unseen before, thou wilt not blame
The humblest of this band who dares to hope
That unto him hath also been vouchsafed
An insight that in some sort he possesses,
A privilege whereby a work of his,
Proceeding from a source of untaught things,
Creative and enduring, may become

A power like one of Nature's. To a hope
Not less ambitious once among the wilds

Of Sarum's Plain, my youthful spirit was raised;
There, as I ranged at will the pastoral downs

Trackless and smooth, or paced the bare white roads
Lengthening in solitude their dreary line,
Time with his retinue of ages fled

Backwards, nor checked his flight until I saw
Our dim ancestral Past in vision clear;

Saw multitudes of men, and, here and there,
A single Briton clothed in wolf-skin vest,

With shield and stone-axe, stride across the wold;
The voice of spears was heard, the rattling spear
Shaken by arms of mighty bone, in strength,
Long mouldered, of barbaric majesty.

I called on Darkness-but before the word

Was uttered, midnight darkness seemed to take
All objects from my sight; and lo! again
The Desert visible by dismal flames;

It is the sacrificial altar, fed

With living men-how deep the groans! the voice
Of those that crowd the giant wicker thrills
The monumental hillocks, and the pomp

Is for both worlds, the living and the dead.
At other moments-(for through that wide waste
Three summer days I roamed) where'er the Plain
Was figured o'er with circles, lines, or mounds,
That yet survive, a work, as some divine,
Shaped by the Druids, so to represent

Their knowledge of the heavens, and image forth
The constellations-gently was I charmed
Into a waking dream, a reverie

That, with believing eyes, where'er I turned,
Beheld long-bearded teachers, with white wands
Uplifted, pointing to the starry sky,
Alternately, and plain below, while breath

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340

Of music swayed their motions, and the waste
Rejoiced with them and me in those sweet sounds.

This for the past, and things that may be viewed 350 Or fancied in the obscurity of years

From monumental hints: and thou, O Friend!

Pleased with some unpremeditated strains

That served those wanderings to beguile, hast said

That then and there my mind had exercised
Upon the vulgar forms of present things,
The actual world of our familiar days,

Yet higher power; had caught from them a tone,
An image, and a character, by books

Not hitherto reflected. Call we this

A partial judgment-and yet why? for then
We were as strangers; and I may not speak
Thus wrongfully of verse, however rude,
Which on thy young imagination, trained
In the great City, broke like light from far.
Moreover, each man's Mind is to herself
Witness and judge; and I remember well
That in life's every-day appearances
I seemed about this time to gain clear sight
Of a new world—a world, too, that was fit
To be transmitted, and to other
eyes
Made visible; as ruled by those fixed laws
Whence spiritual dignity originates,
Which do both give it being and maintain
A balance, an ennobling interchange
Of action from without and from within;
The excellence, pure function, and best power
Both of the object seen, and eye that sees.

360

370

IN

BOOK FOURTEENTH

CONCLUSION

N one of those excursions (may they ne'er
Fade from remembrance!) through the Northern

tracts

Of Cambria ranging with a youthful friend,
I left Bethgelert's huts at couching-time,
And westward took my way, to see the sun
Rise, from the top of Snowdon. To the door

Of a rude cottage at the mountain's base
We came, and roused the shepherd who attends
The adventurous stranger's steps, a trusty guide;
Then, cheered by short refreshment, sallied forth.

It was a close, warm, breezeless summer night,
Wan, dull, and glaring, with a dripping fog
Low-hung and thick that covered all the sky;
But, undiscouraged, we began to climb

The mountain-side. The mist soon girt us round,
And, after ordinary travellers' talk
With our conductor, pensively we sank
Each into commerce with his private thoughts:
Thus did we breast the ascent, and by myself
Was nothing either seen or heard that checked
Those musings or diverted, save that once
The shepherd's lurcher, who, among the crags,
Had to his joy unearthed a hedgehog, teased
His coiled-up prey with barkings turbulent.
This small adventure, for even such it seemed
In that wild place and at the dead of night,
Being over and forgotten, on we wound
In silence as before. With forehead bent
Earthward, as if in opposition set
Against an enemy, I panted up
With eager pace,
and no less
eager thoughts.
Thus might we wear a midnight hour away,
Ascending at loose distance each from each,
And I, as chanced, the foremost of the band;
When at my feet the ground appeared to brighten,
And with a step or two seemed brighter still;
Nor was time given to ask or learn the cause,
For instantly a light upon the turf

Fell like a flash, and lo! as I looked up,
The Moon hung naked in a firmament
Of azure without cloud, and at my
Rested a silent sea of hoary mist.

feet

A hundred hills their dusky backs upheaved
All over this still ocean; and beyond,
Far, far beyond, the solid vapours stretched,
In headlands, tongues, and promontory shapes,
Into the main Atlantic, that appeared
To dwindle, and give up his majesty,
Usurped upon far as the sight could reach.
Not so the ethereal vault; encroachment none
Was there, nor loss; only the inferior stars
Had disappeared, or shed a fainter light

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30

40

50

In the clear presence of the full-orbed Moon,
Who, from her sovereign elevation, gazed
Upon the billowy ocean, as it lay

All meek and silent, save that through a rift—
Not distant from the shore whereon we stood,
A fixed, abysmal, gloomy, breathing-place-
Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams
Innumerable, roaring with one voice!
Heard over earth and sea, and, in that hour,
For so it seemed, felt by the starry heavens.

When into air had partially dissolved
That vision, given to spirits of the night

And three chance human wanderers, in calm thought Reflected, it appeared to me the type

Of a majestic intellect, its acts

And its possessions, what it has and craves,
What in itself it is, and would become.
There I beheld the emblem of a mind
That feeds upon infinity, that broods
Over the dark abyss, intent to hear
Its voices issuing forth to silent light

In one continuous stream; a mind sustained

By recognitions of transcendent power,

In sense conducting to ideal form,

In soul of more than mortal privilege.
One function, above all, of such a mind
Had Nature shadowed there, by putting forth,
'Mid circumstances awful and sublime,
That mutual domination which she loves
To exert upon the face of outward things,
So moulded, joined, abstracted, so endowed

With interchangeable supremacy,

That men, least sensitive, see, hear, perceive,

And cannot choose but feel. The power, which all
Acknowledge when thus moved, which Nature thus
To bodily sense exhibits, is the express
Resemblance of that glorious faculty

That higher minds bear with them as their own.
This is the very spirit in which they deal
With the whole compass of the universe:

They from their native selves can send abroad
Kindred mutations; for themselves create
A like existence; and, whene'er it dawns
Created for them, catch it, or are caught
By its inevitable mastery,

Like angels stopped upon the wing by sound

Of harmony from Heaven's remotest spheres.
Them the enduring and the transient both
Serve to exalt; they build up greatest things
From least suggestions; ever on the watch,
Willing to work and to be wrought upon,
They need not extraordinary calls

To rouse them; in a world of life they live,

By sensible impressions not enthralled,

But by their quickening impulse made more prompt
To hold fit converse with the spiritual world,

And with the generations of mankind

Spread over time, past, present, and to come,
Age after age, till Time shall be no more.
Such minds are truly from the Deity,

For they are Powers; and hence the highest bliss
That flesh can know is theirs-the consciousness
Of Whom they are, habitually infused

Through every image and through every thought,
And all affections by communion raised

From earth to heaven, from human to divine;
Hence endless occupation for the Soul,
Whether discursive or intuitive;

Hence cheerfulness for acts of daily life,
Emotions which best foresight need not fear,
Most worthy then of trust when most intense.
Hence, amid ills that vex and wrongs that crush
Our hearts-if here the words of Holy Writ
May with fit reverence be applied that peace
Which passeth understanding, that repose
In moral judgments which from this pure source
Must come, or will by man be sought in vain.

Oh! who is he that hath his whole life long
Preserved, enlarged, this freedom in himself?
For this alone is genuine liberty:

Where is the favoured being who hath held
That course unchecked, unerring, and untired,
In one perpetual progress smooth and bright?-
A humbler destiny have we retraced,
And told of lapse and hesitating choice,
And backward wanderings along thorny ways:
Yet-compassed round by mountain solitudes,
Within whose solemn temple I received
My earliest visitations, careless then

Of what was given me; and which now I range,
A meditative, oft a suffering, man-
Do I declare-in accents which, from truth