ODE.

INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY, FROM RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD.

I.

There was a time when meadow, grove, and

stream,

The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of yore;— Turn wheresoe'er I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no

more!

II.

The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight

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 passed 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.

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,

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

IV.

Ye blessed creatures, I have heard the call Ye to each other make; I see

The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee ; My heart is at your festival,

My head hath its coronal,

The fulness of your bliss I feel-I feel it all.
Oh, 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,

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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:

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

V.

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,
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.

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.

VII.

Behold the child among his new-born blisses,
A six-years' darling of a pigmy size!
See, where 'mid work of his own band 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-learnéd 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

Ere this be thrown aside,

And with new joy and pride The little actor cons another part; Filling from time to time his "humorous stage" With all the persons, down to palsied age, That Life brings with her in her equipage; As if his whole vocation Were endless imitation.

VIII.

Thou, whose exterior semblance dost belie
Thy soul's immensity;

Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage; thou eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, readest the eternal deep,
Haunted forever by the eternal mind,-

Mighty Prophet! Seer blessed!
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,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

IX.

O joy that in our embers Is something that doth live,

That nature yet remembers

What was so fugitive!

The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benedictions: not indeed

For that which is most worthy to be blessed;
Delight and liberty, the simple creed

Of childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast,-
Not for these I raise

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:
But for those first affections,

Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing;

Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence: truths that wake
To perish never;

Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor,
Nor man, nor boy,

Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!

Hence, in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither;

Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

X.

Then sing, ye birds-sing, sing a joyous song!
And let the young lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound!

We, in thought, will join your throng,
Ye that pipe and ye that play,
Ye that through your hearts to-day
Feel the gladness of the May!

What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now forever taken from my sight,-

Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind;

In the primal sympathy,

Which, having been, must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;

In the faith that looks through death, In years that bring the philosophic mind.

XI.

And oh, ye fountains, meadows, hills, and groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquished one delight,
To live beneath your more habitual sway.

I love the brooks, which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born day
Is lovely yet;

The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober coloring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality:
Another race hath been and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live;
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

EXTEMPORE EFFUSION UPON THE DEATH OF JAMES HOGG.

Of those referred to in these stanzas, Walter Scott died September 21st, 1832; S. T. Coleridge, July 25th, 1834; Charles Lamb, December 27th, 1834: George Crabbe, February 3d, 1832; Felicia Hemans, May 16th, 1835; James Hogg, November 21st, 1835.

When first, descending from the moorlands,
I saw the stream of Yarrow glide
Along a bare and open valley,

The Ettrick Shepherd was my guide.

When last along its banks I wandered, Through groves that had begun to shed Their golden leaves upon the pathways, My steps the Border-minstrel led.

The mighty minstrel breathes no longer, 'Mid mouldering ruins low he lies; And death upon the braes of Yarrow Has closed the shepherd-poet's eyes:

Nor has the rolling year twice measured, From sign to sign its steadfast course, Since every mortal power of Coleridge Was frozen at its marvellous source;

The rapt one of the godlike forehead,

The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth: And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle, Has vanished from his lonely hearth.

Like clouds that rake the mountain summits,
Or waves that own no curbing hand,
How fast has brother followed brother,
From sunshine to the sunless land!

Yet I, whose lids from infant slumber
Were earlier raised, remain to hear
A timid voice, that asks in whispers,
"Who next shall drop and disappear?"

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Our haughty life is crowned with darkness, Like London with its own black wreath, On which with thee, O Crabbe! forth-looking, I gazed from Hampstead's breezy heath.

As if but yesterday departed,

Thou too art gone before; but why, O'er ripe fruit, seasonably gathered, Should frail survivors heave a sigh?

Mourn rather for that holy spirit,

Sweet as the spring, as ocean deep; For her who, ere her summer faded, Has sunk into a breathless sleep.

No more of old romantic sorrows,

For slaughtered youth or love-lorn maid!

With sharper grief is Yarrow smitten,

And Ettrick mourns with her their poet dead. Rydal Mount, November 30th, 1835.

THE SONNET'S SCANTY PLOT. Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room; And hermits are contented with their cells, And students with their pensive citadels: Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom, Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom High as the highest peak of Furness Fells Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells: In truth, the prison unto which we doom Ourselves no prison is; and hence to me, In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground; Pleased if some souls (for such there needs must be) Who have felt the weight of too much liberty, Should find brief solace there, as I have found.