15

Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the
earth.

III

Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound,

To me alone there came a thought of grief;
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong:

20

But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:

65

24

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,

And with the heart of May

Doth every beast keep holiday;

Thou child of joy,

30

Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy shepherd-boy!

IV

35

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,
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

70

75

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

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:
The pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:

50

Ere this be thrown aside,

55

And with new joy and pride

roll, Strength to the brave, and Power, and Deity; Yet in themselves are nothing! One decree Spake laws to them, and said that by the soul

Only, the nations shall be great and free.

I thought of thee, my partner and my guide,
As being past away.
Vain sympathies!
For, backward, Duddon! as I cast my eyes,
I see what was, and is, and will abide;
Still glides the Stream, and shall forever glide;
The Form remains, the Function never dies; 6
While we, the brave, the mighty, and the
wise,

We Men, who in our morn of youth defied
The elements, must vanish; be it so!
Enough, if something from our hands have

To live, and act, and serve the future hour;
And if, as toward the silent tomb we go,
Through love, through hope, and faith's tran-
scendent dower,

We feel that we are greater than we know.

MOST SWEET IT IS

5

Most sweet it is with unuplifted eyes
To pace the ground, if path be there or none,
While a fair region round the traveller lies
Which he forbears again to look upon;
Pleased rather with some soft ideal scene,
The work of Fancy, or some happy tone
Of meditation, slipping in between
The beauty coming and the beauty gone.
If Thought and Love desert us, from that day
Let us break off all commerce with the Muse:
With Thought and Love companions of our

way,

I I

Whate'er the senses take or may refuse,
The Mind's internal heaven shall shed her
dews

Of inspiration on the humblest lay.

SCORN NOT THE SONNET

Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have
frowned,

Mindless of its just honours; with this key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart: the melody
Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's
wound;

A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound; 5
With it Camoëns soothed an exile's grief;
The Sonnet glittered a gay myrtle leaf
Amid the cypress with which Dante crowned

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834)

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA

CHAP. XIV

During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset, diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them when they present themselves.

In this idea originated the plan of the "Lyrical Ballads"; in which it was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at