In scale and order, class the cabinet
  Of their sensations, and in voluble phrase 225
  Run through the history and birth of each
  As of a single independent thing. 
  Hard task, vain hope, to analyse the mind,
  If each most obvious and particular thought,
  Not in a mystical and idle sense, 230
  But in the words of Reason deeply weighed,
  Hath no beginning. 
                      Blest the infant Babe,
  (For with my best conjecture I would trace
  Our Being’s earthly progress,) blest the Babe,
  Nursed in his Mother’s arms, who sinks to sleep 235
  Rocked on his Mother’s breast; who with his soul
  Drinks in the feelings of his Mother’s eye! 
  For him, in one dear Presence, there exists
  A virtue which irradiates and exalts
  Objects through widest intercourse of sense. 240
  No outcast he, bewildered and depressed: 
  Along his infant veins are interfused
  The gravitation and the filial bond
  Of nature that connect him with the world. 
  Is there a flower, to which he points with hand 245
  Too weak to gather it, already love
  Drawn from love’s purest earthly fount for him
  Hath beautified that flower; already shades
  Of pity cast from inward tenderness
  Do fall around him upon aught that bears 250
  Unsightly marks of violence or harm. 
  Emphatically such a Being lives,
  Frail creature as he is, helpless as frail,
  An inmate of this active universe. 
  For feeling has to him imparted power 255
  That through the growing faculties of sense
  Doth like an agent of the one great Mind
  Create, creator and receiver both,
  Working but in alliance with the works
  Which it beholds.  Such, verily, is the first 260
  Poetic spirit of our human life,
  By uniform control of after years,
  In most, abated or suppressed; in some,
  Through every change of growth and of decay,
  Pre-eminent till death.

                         From early days, 265
  Beginning not long after that first time
  In which, a Babe, by intercourse of touch
  I held mute dialogues with my Mother’s heart,
  I have endeavoured to display the means
  Whereby this infant sensibility, 270
  Great birthright of our being, was in me
  Augmented and sustained.  Yet is a path
  More difficult before me; and I fear
  That in its broken windings we shall need
  The chamois’ sinews, and the eagle’s wing:  275
  For now a trouble came into my mind
  From unknown causes.  I was left alone
  Seeking the visible world, nor knowing why. 
  The props of my affections were removed,