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THE POET'S INVOCATION.

eeps record of the trophies won from thee;
oping to still these obstinate questionings
of thee and thine by forcing some lone ghost,
by messenger, to render up the tale

125

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what we are. In lone and silent hours, hen night makes a weird sound of its own stillness, ke an inspired and desperate alchemist king his very life on some dark hope, ve I mixed awful talk and asking looks th my most innocent love; until strange tears, Sting with those breathless kisses, made magic as compels the charmèd night render up thy charge. And, though ne'er yet hast unveiled thy inmost sanctuary, gh from incommunicable dream,

twilight phantasms, and deep noonday thought,
hone within me, that serenely now
noveless (as a long-forgotten lyre
nded in the solitary dome

me mysterious and deserted fane)

thy breath, Great Parent; that my strain modulate with murmurs of the air, motions of the forests and the sea, voice of living beings, and woven hymns night and day, and the deep heart of man. P. B. Shelley.

120

INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY.

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.

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.

Behold the Child among his newborn 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!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learnéd art;

INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY.

A wedding or a festival,

A mourning or a funeral;

And this hath now his heart,
And unto this he frames his song:
Then will he fit his tongue

To dialogues of business, love, or strife;
But it will not be long

Ere this be thrown aside,

And with new joy and pride

The little actor cons another part;

Filling from time to time his 'humorous stage'
With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,
That life brings with her in her equipage;
As if his whole vocation

Were endless imitation.

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;
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!

121

122

INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY.

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 surprized:
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—

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