We know where we have friends. Ye dreamers, then,
Forgers of daring tales! we bless you then,
Impostors, drivellers, dotards, as the ape 525
Philosophy will call you: then we feel
With what, and how great might ye are in league,
Who make our wish, our power, our thought a deed,
An empire, a possession,—ye whom time
And seasons serve; all Faculties to whom 530
Earth crouches, the elements are potter’s clay,
Space like a heaven filled up with northern lights,
Here, nowhere, there, and everywhere at once.
Relinquishing this lofty eminence
For ground, though humbler, not the less
a tract 535
Of the same isthmus, which our spirits
cross
In progress from their native continent
To earth and human life, the Song might
dwell
On that delightful time of growing youth,
When craving for the marvellous gives
way 540
To strengthening love for things that
we have seen;
When sober truth and steady sympathies,
Offered to notice by less daring pens,
Take firmer hold of us, and words themselves
Move us with conscious pleasure.
I
am sad 545
At thought of raptures now for ever flown;
[R]
Almost to tears I sometimes could be sad
To think of, to read over, many a page,
Poems withal of name, which at that time
Did never fail to entrance me, and are
now 550
Dead in my eyes, dead as a theatre
Fresh emptied of spectators. Twice
five years
Or less I might have seen, when first
my mind
With conscious pleasure opened to the
charm
Of words in tuneful order, found them
sweet 555
For their own sakes, a passion,
and a power;
And phrases pleased me chosen for delight,
For pomp, or love. Oft, in the public
roads
Yet unfrequented, while the morning light
Was yellowing the hill tops, I went abroad
560
With a dear friend, [S] and for the better
part
Of two delightful hours we strolled along
By the still borders of the misty lake,
[T]
Repeating favourite verses with one voice,
Or conning more, as happy as the birds
565
That round us chaunted. Well might
we be glad,
Lifted above the ground by airy fancies,
More bright than madness or the dreams
of wine;
And, though full oft the objects of our
love
Were false, and in their splendour overwrought,
[U] 570
Yet was there surely then no vulgar power
Working within us,—nothing
less, in truth,
Than that most noble attribute of man,
Though yet untutored and inordinate,
That wish for something loftier, more