Farewell! farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest,
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

MAN REDEEMABLE.

LINES ON VISITING A PRISON.

AND this place my forefathers made for man!
With other ministrations thou, O Nature!
Healest thy wandering and distempered child:
Thou pourest on him thy soft influences,

Thy sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing sweets,-
Thy melodies of woods, and winds, and waters,
Till he relent, and can no more endure

To be a jarring and a dissonant thing
Amid this general dance and minstrelsy;
But, bursting into tears, wins back his way,
His angry spirit healed and harmonized
By the benignant touch of love and beauty.

William Wordsworth.

1770-1850.

INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY, FROM RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD.

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..

Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy soul's immensity!

Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage! thou eye among the blind,
That, deaf, and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the Eternal Mind, -
Mighty prophet! Seer blest!

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!

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 benediction: not indeed

For that which is most worthy to be blest;
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 endeavour,
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.

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 for ever 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.