Yet may we not entirely overlook 115
  The pleasure gathered from the rudiments
  Of geometric science.  Though advanced
  In these inquiries, with regret I speak,
  No farther than the threshold, [G] there I found
  Both elevation and composed delight:  120
  With Indian awe and wonder, ignorance pleased
  With its own struggles, did I meditate
  On the relation those abstractions bear
  To Nature’s laws, and by what process led,
  Those immaterial agents bowed their heads 125
  Duly to serve the mind of earth-born man;
  From star to star, from kindred sphere to sphere,
  From system on to system without end.

    More frequently from the same source I drew
  A pleasure quiet and profound, a sense 130
  Of permanent and universal sway,
  And paramount belief; there, recognised
  A type, for finite natures, of the one
  Supreme Existence, the surpassing life
  Which—­to the boundaries of space and time, 135
  Of melancholy space and doleful time,
  Superior, and incapable of change,
  Nor touched by welterings of passion—­is,
  And hath the name of, God.  Transcendent peace
  And silence did await upon these thoughts 140
  That were a frequent comfort to my youth.

    ’Tis told by one whom stormy waters threw,
  With fellow-sufferers by the shipwreck spared,
  Upon a desert coast, that having brought
  To land a single volume, saved by chance, 145
  A treatise of Geometry, he wont,
  Although of food and clothing destitute,
  And beyond common wretchedness depressed,
  To part from company and take this book
  (Then first a self-taught pupil in its truths) 150
  To spots remote, and draw his diagrams
  With a long staff upon the sand, and thus
  Did oft beguile his sorrow, and almost
  Forget his feeling:  so (if like effect
  From the same cause produced, ’mid outward things 155
  So different, may rightly be compared),
  So was it then with me, and so will be
  With Poets ever.  Mighty is the charm
  Of those abstractions to a mind beset
  With images, and haunted by herself, 160
  And specially delightful unto me
  Was that clear synthesis built up aloft
  So gracefully; even then when it appeared
  Not more than a mere plaything, or a toy
  To sense embodied:  not the thing it is 165
  In verity, an independent world,
  Created out of pure intelligence.