The Prelude

And Como! thou, a treasure whom the earth

Keeps to herself, confined as in a depth

Of Abyssinian privacy. I spake

Of thee, thy chestnut woods, and garden plots

Of Indian-corn tended by dark-eyed maids;

Thy lofty steeps, and pathways roofed with vines,

Winding from house to house, from town to town,

Sole link that binds them to each other; walks,

League after league, and cloistral avenues,

Where silence dwells if music be not there:

While yet a youth undisciplined in verse,

Through fond ambition of that hour, I strove

To chant your praise; nor can approach you now

Ungreeted by a more melodious song,

Where tones of nature smoothed by learned art

May flow in lasting current. Like a breeze

Or sunbeam over your domain I passed

In motion without pause; but ye have left

Your beauty with me, a serene accord

Of forms and colors, passive, yet endowed

In their submissiveness with power as sweet

And gracious, almost might I dare to say,

As virtue is, or goodness; sweet as love,

Or the remembrance of a generous deed,

Or mildest visitation of pure thought,

When God, the giver of all joy, is thanked

Religiously, in silent blessedness;

Sweet as this last herself, for such it is.

A day

Spent in a round of strenuous idleness.

Nor was it mean delight

To watch crude Nature work in untaught minds;

To note the laws and progress of belief;

Though obstinate on this way, yet on that

How willingly we travel, and how far!

To have, for instance, brought upon the scene

The champion, Jack the Giant-killer: Lo!

He dons his coat of darkness; on the stage

Walks, and achieves his wonders, from the eye

Of living Mortal covert, "as the moon

Hid in her vacant interlunar cave."

Delusion bold! and how can it be wrought?

The garb he wears is black as death, the word

"Invisible" flames forth upon his chest.

Oh 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

From the vast city, where I long had pined

A discontented sojourner: now free,

Free as a bird to settle where I will.

All moveables of wonder, from all parts,

Are here—Albinos, painted Indians, Dwarfs,

The Horse of knowledge, and the learned Pig,

The Stone-eater, the man that swallows fire,

Giants, Ventriloquists, the Invisible Girl,

The Bust that speaks and moves its goggling eyes,

The Wax-work, Clock-work, all the marvellous craft

Of modern Merlins, Wild Beasts, Puppet-shows,

All out-o'-the-way, far-fetched, perverted things,

All freaks of nature, all Promethean thoughts

Of man, his dullness, madness, and their feats

All jumbled up together, to compose

A Parliament of Monsters.

The earth is all before me. With a heart

Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,

I look about; and should the chosen guide

Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,

I cannot miss my way.

With the din

Smitten, the precipices rang aloud;

The leafless trees and every icy crag

Tinkled like iron; while far distant hills

Into the tumult sent an alien sound

Of melancholy.

The budding rose above the rose full blown.

Whether we be young or old,

Our destiny, our being's heart and home,

Is with infinitude, and only there;

With hope it is, hope that can never die,

Effort and expectation, and desire,

And something evermore about to be.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven!

Characters of the great Apocalypse,

The types and symbols of Eternity,

Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.

Leaving the tumultuous throng,

To cut across the reflex of a star

That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed

Upon the glassy plain.

Fair seedtime had my soul, and I grew up

Fostered alike by beauty and by fear.

When from our better selves we have too long

Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,

Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,

How gracious, how benign, is Solitude.

There's not a man

That lives who hath not known his god-like hours.

Multitudes of hours

Pilfered away, by what the Bard who sang

Of the Enchanter Indolence hath called

"Good-natured lounging," and behold a map

Of my collegiate life.

Go to the Poets, they will speak to thee

More perfectly of purer creatures;—yet

If reason be nobility in man,

Can aught be more ignoble than the man

Whom they delight in, blinded as he is

By prejudice, the miserable slave

Of low ambition or distempered love?

How oft, amid those overflowing streets,

Have I gone forward with the crowd, and said

Unto myself, "The face of every one

That passes by me is a mystery!"

All shod with steel,

We hissed along the polished ice in games

Confederate.

For I would walk alone,

Under the quiet stars, and at that time

Have felt whate'er there is of power in sound

To breathe an elevated mood, by form

Or image unprofaned; and I would stand,

If the night blackened with a coming storm,

Beneath some rock, listening to notes that are

The ghostly language of the ancient earth,

Or make their dim abode in distant winds.

Thence did I drink the visionary power;

And deem not profitless those fleeting moods

Of shadowy exultation: not for this,

That they are kindred to our purer mind

And intellectual life; but that the soul,

Remembering how she felt, but what she felt

Remembering not, retains an obscure sense

Of possible sublimity, whereto

With growing faculties she doth aspire,

With faculties still growing, feeling still

That whatsoever point they gain, they yet

Have something to pursue.

Huge and mighty forms, that do not live

Like living men, moved slowly through the mind

By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

Mighty is the charm

Of those abstractions to a mind beset

With images, and haunted by herself,

And specially delightful unto me

Was that clear synthesis built up aloft

So gracefully; even then when it appeared

Not more than a mere plaything, or a toy

To sense embodied: not the thing it is

In verity, an independent world,

Created out of pure intelligence.

Where the statue stood

Of Newton with his prism and silent face,

The marble index of a mind forever

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.

Brothers all

In honour, as in one community,

Scholars and gentlemen.

'Tis told by one whom stormy waters threw,

With fellow-sufferers by the shipwreck spared,

Upon a desert coast, that having brought

To land a single volume, saved by chance,

A treatise of Geometry.

Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows

Like harmony in music; there is a dark

Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles

Discordant elements, makes them cling together

In one society.

Another morn

Risen on mid-noon.

A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.

How men lived

Even next-door neighbours, as we say, yet still

Strangers, not knowing each the other's name.

Here must thou be, O Man!

Power to thyself; no Helper hast thou here;

Here keepest thou in singleness thy state:

No other can divide with thee this work:

No secondary hand can intervene

To fashion this ability; 'tis thine,

The prime and vital principle is thine

In the recesses of thy nature, far

From any reach of outward fellowship,

Else is not thine at all.

Oh! give us once again the wishing cap

Of Fortunatus, and the invisible coat

Of Jack the Giant-killer, Robin Hood,

And Sabra in the forest with St. George!

The child, whose love is here, at least, doth reap

One precious gain, that he forgets himself.

Frank-hearted maids of rocky Cumberland.

Oh, blank confusion! true epitome

Of what the mighty City is herself,

To thousands upon thousands of her sons,

Living amid the same perpetual whirl

Of trivial objects, melted and reduced

To one identity, by differences

That have no law, no meaning, and no end—

Oppression, under which even highest minds

Must labour, whence the strongest are not free.

Many are our joys

In youth, but oh! what happiness to live

When every hour brings palpable access

Of knowledge, when all knowledge is delight,

And sorrow is not there!

The grim shape

Towered up between me and the stars, and still,

For so it seemed, with purpose of its own

And measured motion like a living thing,

Strode after me.

There is

One great society alone on earth:

The noble Living and the noble Dead.

Yet still the solitary cliffs

Wheeled by me—even as if the earth had rolled

With visible motion her diurnal round!

Wisdom and Spirit of the universe!

Thou Soul that art the eternity of thought,

That givest to forms and images a breath

And everlasting motion.

And I was taught to feel, perhaps too much,

The self-sufficing power of Solitude.