Wishing to hope, without a hope; some fears About my future worldly maintenance;6 And, more than all, a strangeness in the mind, A feeling that I was not for that hour, Nor for that place. But wherefore be cast down? For (not to speak of Reason and her pure Reflective acts to fix the moral law Deep in the conscience; nor of Christian Hope Bowing her head before her Sister Faith As one far mightier),7 hither I had come, Bear witness, Truth, endowed with holy powers And faculties, whether to work or feel. Oft when the dazzling shew no longer new Had ceased to dazzle, ofttimes did I quit My Comrades, leave the Crowd, buildings and groves, And as I paced alone the level fields Far from those lovely sights and sounds sublime With which I had been conversant, the mind Drooped not, but there into herself returning With prompt rebound, seemed fresh as heretofore. At least I more distinctly recognized Her native0 instincts; let me dare to speak A higher language, say that now I felt What independent solaces were mine To mitigate the injurious sway of place Or circumstance, how far soever changed In youth, or to be changed in manhood's prime; Or, for the few who shall be called to look On the long shadows, in our evening years, Ordained Precursors to the night of death. As if awakened, summoned, roused, constrained, I looked for universal things, perused The common countenance of earth and sky; Earth no where unembellished by some trace Of that first paradise whence man was driven; And sky whose beauty and bounty are expressed By the proud name she bears, the name of heaven. I called on both to teach me what they might; Or, turning the mind in upon herself, Pored, watched, expected, listened, spread my thoughts And spread them with a wider creeping; felt
Incumbencies more awful,8 visitings Of the Upholder, of the tranquil Soul That tolerates the indignities of Time; And, from his centre of eternity All finite motions overruling, lives In glory immutable. But peace!?enough Here to record I had ascended now
6. Wordsworth was troubled by his family's expectation that his success at his studies would lead to his appointment as a fellow of St. John's College at the end of his degree. 7. This pious qualification, lines 83?87, was added by Wordsworth in late revisions of The Prelude. In the version of 1805, he wrote: 'I was a chosen son. / For hither I had come with holy powers / And faculties, whether to work or feel.'
8. I.e., the weight of more awe-inspiring moods.
.
THE PRELUDE, BOOK THIRTEENTH / 351
To such community with highest truth.
?A track pursuing, not untrod before,
From strict analogies by thought supplied,
Or consciousnesses not to be subdued,
no To every natural form, rock, fruit or flower,
Even the loose stones that cover the high-way,
I gave a moral life; I saw them feel,
Or linked them to some feeling: the great mass
Lay bedded in a quickening0 soul, and all life-giving
135 That I beheld respired with inward meaning.
Add, that whate'er of Terror or of Love
Or Beauty, Nature's daily face put on
From transitory passion, unto this
I was as sensitive as waters are
140 To the sky's influence: in a kindred mood
Of passion, was obedient as a lute
That waits upon the touches of the wind.9
Unknown, unthought of, yet I was most rich;
I had a world about me; 'twas my own,
145 I made it; for it only lived to me,
And to the God who sees into the heart.
Such sympathies, though rarely, were betrayed
By outward gestures and by visible looks:
Some called it madness?so, indeed, it was,
i5o If child-like fruitfulness in passing joy,
If steady moods of thoughtfulness, matured
To inspiration, sort with such a name;
If prophecy be madness; if things viewed
By Poets in old time, and higher up
155 By the first men, earth's first inhabitants,
May in these tutored days no more be seen
With undisordered sight. But, leaving this,
It was no madness: for the bodily eye
Amid my strongest workings evermore
