Of minster clock!

From that bleak tenement

He, many an evening, to his distant home

In solitude returning, saw the hills

Grow larger in the darkness; all alone

Beheld the stars come out above his head,

And travelled through the wood, with no one near
To whom he might confess the things he saw.

So the foundations of his mind were laid,
In such communion, not from terror free,*
While yet a child, and long before his time,
Had he1 perceived the presence and the power
Of greatness; and deep feelings had impressed.
So vividly great objects that they lay
Upon his mind like substances, whose presence
Perplexed the bodily sense. He had received

A precious gift; for, as he grew in years,

-BYRON, Childe Harold, Canto IV., St. clxxxiv.

-ED.

With these impressions would he still compare

All his remembrances, thoughts, shapes, and forms;
And, being still unsatisfied with aught
Of dimmer character, he thence attained
An active power to fasten images

Upon his brain; and on their pictured lines
Intensely brooded, even till they acquired
The liveliness of dreams.* Nor did he fail,
While yet a child, with a child's eagerness
Incessantly to turn his ear, and eye

On all things which the moving seasons brought
To feed such appetite-nor this alone
Appeased his yearning:-in the after-day
Of boyhood, many an hour in caves forlorn,
And 'mid the hollow depths of naked crags
He sate, and even in their fixed lineaments,
Or from the power of a peculiar eye,
Or by creative feeling overborne,
Or by predominance of thought oppressed,
Even in their fixed and steady lineaments
He traced an ebbing and a flowing mind,
Expression ever varying!

Thus informed,
He had small need of books; for many a tale
Traditionary, round the mountains hung,
And many a legend, peopling the dark woods,
Nourished Imagination in her growth,
And gave the Mind that apprehensive power

⚫ Compare

"those obstinate questionings

Of sense, and outward things," &c.

-The Ode on Immortality (Vol. IV.
"What I saw

Appeared like something in myself, a dream,

A prospect of the mind."

p. 53).

-The Prelude, Book II. (Vol. III. p. 167).-ED.

By which she is made quick to recognise
The moral properties and scope of things.
But eagerly he read, and read again,
Whate'er the minister's old shelf supplied;
The life and death of martyrs, who sustained,
With will inflexible, those fearful pangs
Triumphantly displayed in records left

Of persecution, and the Covenant-times
Whose echo rings through Scotland to this hour!
And there, by lucky hap, had been preserved
A straggling volume, torn and incomplete,
That left half-told* the preternatural tale,
Romance of giants, chronicle of fiends,
Profuse in garniture of wooden cuts

Strange and uncouth; dire faces, figures dire,
Sharp-kneed, sharp-elbowed, and lean-ankled too,

With long and ghostly shanks-forms which once seen Could never be forgotten!

In his heart,

Where Fear sate thus, a cherished visitant,
Was wanting yet the pure delight of love
By sound diffused, or by the breathing air,t
Or by the silent looks of happy things,‡

With every form of creature as it looked

Towards the Uncreated, with a countenance

Of adoration, with an eye of love."

-The Prelude, Book II. (Vol. III. p. 167).—ED.

Or flowing from the universal face

Of earth and sky. But he had felt the power
Of Nature, and already was prepared,

By his intense conceptions, to receive
Deeply the lesson deep of love which he,
Whom Nature, by whatever means, has taught
To feel intensely, cannot but receive.

Such was the Boy-but for the growing Youth
What soul was his, when, from the naked top
Of some bold headland,' he beheld the sun

Rise up, and bathe the world in light!* He looked-
Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth

And ocean's liquid mass, in gladness Jay

Beneath himt:-Far and wide the clouds were touched, And in their silent faces could he read2

In gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched,
And in their silent faces did he read

1814.

1836.

could he read

Compare Book IV. p. 150; also

"And washed by the morning water-gold

Florence lay out on the mountain-side."

ROBERT BROWNING: Old Pictures in Florence, St. 1.

-ED.

+ The sea is not visible from the hills of Athole, except from the summit of Ben y' Gloe, where it can be seen to the south-east in the clearest weather. Wordsworth did not care for local accuracy in this passage. It was quite unnecessary for his purpose. Compare his account of the morning walk near Hawkshead in The Prelude, Vol. III. p. 202, and see the appendix-note to that volume, p. 413, &c.-ED.

1

Unutterable love.

Sound needed none,

*

Nor any voice of joy; his spirit drank

The spectacle: sensation, soul, and form,
All melted into him; they swallowed up
His animal being; in them did he live,
And by them did he live; they were his life.

In such access of mind, in such high hour

Of visitation from the living God,

Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired.
No thanks he breathed, he proferred no request;
Rapt into still communion that transcends
The imperfect offices of prayer and praise,
His mind was a thanksgiving to the power
That made him; it was blessedness and love!

A Herdsman on the lonely mountain tops,
Such intercourse was his, and in this sort
Was his existence oftentimes possessed.
O then how beautiful, how bright, appeared
The written promise! Early had he learned 1
To reverence the volume that displays 2
The mystery, the life which cannot die;
But in the mountains did he feel his faith.
All things, responsive to the writing, there 3

There did he see the writing;-all things there

1814.

1827.

Responsive to the writing, all things there

Compare Tintern Abbey, in which he speaks of the Rock, the Mountain, and the Wood, their colours and their forms, as an appetite, a feeling, and

a joy,

"That had no need of a remoter charm
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye."

See Vol. I. p.

269.-ED.