Those incidental charms which first attached
My heart to rural objects, day by day
Grew weaker, and I hasten on to tell
How Nature, intervenient6 till this time
And secondary, now at length was sought
For her own sake. But who shall7 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
Science8 appears but what in truth she is,
Not as our glory and our absolute boast,
But as a succedaneum,9 and a prop
To our infirmity. No officious0 slave intrusive
Art thou of that false secondary power1
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 cabinet2
Of their sensations, and in voluble phrase3
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,
5. Cottages built of gray stones. 6. I.e., entering incidentally into his other concerns. 7. Is able to. 8. In the old sense: learning. 9. In medicine a drug substituted for a different drug. Wordsworth, however, uses the term to signify a remedy, or palliative.
1. The analytic faculty of the mind, as contrasted with the power to apprehend 'the unity of all' (line 221).
2. To classify, as if arranged in a display case. 3. In fluent words.
.
THE PRELUDE, BOOK THIRTEENTH / 343
230 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,
235 Nursed in his Mother's arms, who sinks to sleep Rocked on his Mother's breast; who, when his soul Claims manifest kindred with a human soul, Drinks in the feelings of his Mother's eye!4 For him, in one dear Presence, there exists
240 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
245 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
250 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,
255 An inmate of? this active universe. a dweller in 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,
