Discerning sword that Justice wields, do thou
  Go forth and prosper; and, ye purging fires, 445
  Up to the loftiest towers of Pride ascend,
  Fanned by the breath of angry Providence. 
  But oh! if Past and Future be the wings,
  On whose support harmoniously conjoined
  Moves the great spirit of human knowledge, spare 450
  These courts of mystery, where a step advanced
  Between the portals of the shadowy rocks
  Leaves far behind life’s treacherous vanities,
  For penitential tears and trembling hopes
  Exchanged—­to equalise in God’s pure sight 455
  Monarch and peasant:  be the house redeemed
  With its unworldly votaries, for the sake
  Of conquest over sense, hourly achieved
  Through faith and meditative reason, resting
  Upon the word of heaven-imparted truth, 460
  Calmly triumphant; and for humbler claim
  Of that imaginative impulse sent
  From these majestic floods, yon shining cliffs,
  The untransmuted shapes of many worlds,
  Cerulean ether’s pure inhabitants, 465
  These forests unapproachable by death,
  That shall endure as long as man endures,
  To think, to hope, to worship, and to feel,
  To struggle, to be lost within himself
  In trepidation, from the blank abyss 470
  To look with bodily eyes, and be consoled.” 
  Not seldom since that moment have I wished
  That thou, O Friend! the trouble or the calm
  Hadst shared, when, from profane regards apart,
  In sympathetic reverence we trod 475
  The floors of those dim cloisters, till that hour,
  From their foundation, strangers to the presence
  Of unrestricted and unthinking man. 
  Abroad, how cheeringly the sunshine lay
  Upon the open lawns!  Vallombre’s groves 480
  Entering, [s] we fed the soul with darkness; thence
  Issued, and with uplifted eyes beheld,
  In different quarters of the bending sky,
  The cross of Jesus stand erect, as if
  Hands of angelic powers had fixed it there, [t] 485
  Memorial reverenced by a thousand storms;
  Yet then, from the undiscriminating sweep
  And rage of one State-whirlwind, insecure.

    ’Tis not my present purpose to retrace
  That variegated journey step by step. 490
  A march it was of military speed, [u]
  And Earth did change her images and forms
  Before us, fast as clouds are changed in heaven. 
  Day after day, up early and down late,
  From hill to vale we dropped, from vale to hill 495
  Mounted—­from province on to province swept,
  Keen hunters in a chase of fourteen weeks, [u]
  Eager as birds of prey, or as a ship