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, Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy shepherd boy! The things which I have seen I now can Ye blesséd creatures, I have heard the 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, Look round her when the heavens are The fulness of your bliss, I feel — I feel bare; Waters on a starry night Are beautiful and fair; The sunshine is a glorious birth: That there hath passed away a glory from the earth. Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song, And while the young lambs bound To me alone there came a thought of grief; A timely utterance gave that thought relief, And I again am strong. it all. O evil day! if I were sullen While Earth herself is adorning, This sweet May morning, And the children are culling, On every side, In a thousand valleys far and wide, Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm, And the babe leaps up on his mother's arm: I hear, I hear, with joy I hear! But there's a tree, of many one, A single field which I have looked upon, Both of them speak of something that is gone; 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 east Must travel, still is Nature's priest, Is on his way attended; At length the man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day. 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. Behold the child among his new-born blisses, A six years' darling of a pygmy 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; Ere this be thrown aside, The little actor cons another part; Filling from time to time his humorous stage With all the persons, down to palsied age, 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 O joy that in our embers The thought of our past years in me doth breed Perpetual benediction: not indeed Delight and liberty, the simple creed Not for these I raise WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. 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 realized, High instincts before which our mortal nature Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised: Our noisy years seem moments in the being Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor, Nor man nor boy, Hence, in a season of calm weather, Our souls have sight of that immortal sea 99 That floats on high o'er vales and hills, Continuous as the stars that shine The waves beside them danced, but they I gazed and gazed--but little thought For oft, when on my couch I lie 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, But trailing clouds of glory, do we come 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, Ere this be throwi As if his wh |