XIV.

SONNET

ON THE LATE GENERAL FAST,

MARCH 21. 1832.

RELUCTANT call it was, the Rite delayed;
And in the senate some there were, who doffed
The last of their humanity, and scoffed
At providential judgment, — undismayed
By their own daring. But the People prayed
As with one voice; their flinty heart grew soft
With penitential sorrow, and aloft

Their spirit mounted, crying, God us aid!
Oh that with soul-aspirings more intense
And heart-humiliations more profound
This People, long so happy, so renowned
For liberty, would seek from God defence
Against far heavier ill the Pestilence
Of Revolution, impiously unbound!

XV.

ODE.

INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY FROM RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD.

The Child is Father of the Man ;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

See Vol. I. page 3.

1.

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.

2.

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 past away a glory from the earth.

3.

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

Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy

Shepherd Boy!

4.

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 the Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,

And the Children are pulling

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,
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?

5.

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.

6.

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.

7.

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 s!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learnèd art ;
A wedding or a festival,

A mourning or a funeral;

And this hath now his heart,