The Prelude. William Wordsworth

blew his flute

       Alone upon the rock—oh, then, the calm

       And dead still water lay upon my mind

       Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky,

       Never before so beautiful, sank down

       Into my heart, and held me like a dream!

       Thus were my sympathies enlarged, and thus

       Daily the common range of visible things

       Grew dear to me: already I began

       To love the sun; a boy I loved the sun,

       Not as I since have loved him, as a pledge

       And surety of our earthly life, a light

       Which we behold and feel we are alive;

       Nor for his bounty to so many worlds—

       But for this cause, that I had seen him lay

       His beauty on the morning hills, had seen

       The western mountain touch his setting orb,

       ​In many a thoughtless hour, when, from excess

       Of happiness, my blood appeared to flow

       For its own pleasure, and I breathed with joy.

       And, from like feelings, humble though intense,

       To patriotic and domestic love

       Analogous, the moon to me was dear;

       For I could dream away my purposes,

       Standing to gaze upon her while she hung

       Midway between the hills, as if she knew

       No other region, but belonged to thee,

       Yea, appertained by a peculiar right

       To thee and thy grey huts, thou one dear Vale!

      Those incidental charms which first attached

       My heart to rural objects, day by day

       Grew weaker, and I hasten on to tell

       How Nature, intervenient till this time

       And secondary, now at length was sought

       For her own sake. But who shall parcel out

       His intellect by geometric rules,

       Split like a province into round and square?

       Who knows the individual hour in which

       His habits were first sown, even as a seed?

       Who that shall point as with a wand and say

       "This portion of the river of my mind

       ​Came from yon fountain?" Thou, my Friend! art one

       More deeply read in thy own thoughts; to thee

       Science appears but what in truth she is,

       Not as our glory and our absolute boast,

       But as a succedaneum, and a prop

       To our infirmity. No officious slave

       Art thou of that false secondary power

       By which we multiply distinctions, then

       Deem that our puny boundaries are things

       That we perceive, and not that we have made.

       To thee, unblinded by these formal arts,

       The unity of all hath been revealed,

       And thou wilt doubt, with me less aptly skilled

       Than many are to range the faculties

       In scale and order, class the cabinet

       Of their sensations, and in voluble phrase

       Run through the history and birth of each

       As of a single independent thing.

       Hard task, vain hope, to analyse the mind,

       If each most obvious and particular thought,

       Not in a mystical and idle sense,

       But in the words of Reason deeply weighed,

       Hath no beginning.

      Blest the infant Babe,

       (For with my best conjecture I would trace

       ​Our Being's earthly progress,) blest the Babe,

       Nursed in his Mother's arms, who sinks to sleep

       Rocked on his Mother's breast; who with his soul

       Drinks in the feelings of his Mother's eye!

       For him, in one dear Presence, there exists

       A virtue which irradiates and exalts

       Objects through widest intercourse of sense.

       No outcast he, bewildered and depressed:

       Along his infant veins are interfused

       The gravitation and the filial bond

       Of nature that connect him with the world.

       Is there a flower, to which he points with hand

       Too weak to gather it, already love

       Drawn from love's purest earthly fount for him

       Hath beautified that flower; already shades

       Of pity cast from inward tenderness

       Do fall around him upon aught that bears

       Unsightly marks of violence or harm.

       Emphatically such a Being lives,

       Frail creature as he is, helpless as frail,

       An inmate of this active universe.

       For feeling has to him imparted power

       That through the growing faculties of sense

       Doth like an agent of the one great Mind

       Create, creator and receiver both,

       ​Working but in alliance with the works

       Which it beholds.—Such, verily, is the first

       Poetic spirit of our human life,

       By uniform control of after years,

       In most, abated or suppressed; in some,

       Through every change of growth and of decay,

       Pre-eminent till death.

      From early days,

       Beginning not long after that first time

       In which, a Babe, by intercourse of touch

       I held mute dialogues with my Mother's heart,

       I have endeavoured to display the means

       Whereby this infant sensibility,

       Great birthright of our being, was in me

       Augmented and sustained. Yet is a path

       More difficult before me; and I fear

       That in its broken windings we shall need

       The chamois' sinews, and the eagle's wing:

       For now a trouble came into my mind

       From unknown causes. I was left alone

       Seeking the visible world, nor knowing why.

       The props of my affections were removed,

       And yet the building stood, as if sustained

       By its own spirit! All that I beheld

       Was dear, and hence to finer influxes

       ​The mind lay open to a more exact

       And close communion. Many are our joys

       In youth, but oh! what happiness to live

       When every hour brings palpable access

       Of knowledge, when all knowledge