Through no disturbance of my soul, But in the quietness of thought: Me this unchartered freedom tires; I feel the weight of chance-desires : My hopes no more must change their name, Stern Lawgiver! yet thou dost wear Flowers laugh before thee on their beds And fragrance in thy footing treads; Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong; And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and strong. To humbler functions, awful Power! And in the light of truth thy Bondman let me live! (1805.) THE NIGHTINGALE. O Nightingale! thou surely art These notes of thine-they pierce and pierce ; Thou sing'st as if the God of wine I heard a Stock-dove sing or say He did not cease; but cooed-and cooed; THE MOUNTAIN ECHO. Yes, it was the mountain Echo, Answering to the shouting Cuckoo, Unsolicited reply To a babbling wanderer sent; Hears not also mortal Life? Hear not we, unthinking Creatures! Have not we too?-yes, we have Such rebounds our inward ear (1806.) (1806.) There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. 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, As to the tabor's sound, To me alone there came a thought of grief: The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep; Give themselves up to jollity, And with the heart of May Doth every Beast keep holiday ;- Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy 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 head hath its coronal, The fulness of your bliss, I feel-I feel it all. And the Children are culling On every side, In a thousand valleys far and wide, And the Babe leaps up on his Mother's arm :— -But there's a Tree, of many, one, 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: And cometh from afar: But trailing clouds of glory do we come Heaven lies about us in our infancy! But He beholds the light, and whence it flows The Youth, who daily farther from the east Is on his way attended; At length the Man perceives it die away, 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, |