Giants, Ventriloquists, the Invisible Girl, 710
  The Bust that speaks and moves its goggling eyes,
  The Wax-work, Clock-work, all the marvellous craft
  Of modern Merlins, Wild Beasts, Puppet-shows,
  All out-o’-the-way, far-fetched, perverted things,
  All freaks of nature, all Promethean thoughts 715
  Of man, his dullness, madness, and their feats
  All jumbled up together, to compose
  A Parliament of Monsters.  Tents and Booths
  Meanwhile, as if the whole were one vast mill,
  Are vomiting, receiving on all sides, 720
  Men, Women, three-years’ Children, Babes in arms.

    Oh, blank confusion! true epitome
  Of what the mighty City is herself,
  To thousands upon thousands of her sons,
  Living amid the same perpetual whirl 725
  Of trivial objects, melted and reduced
  To one identity, by differences
  That have no law, no meaning, and no end—­
  Oppression, under which even highest minds
  Must labour, whence the strongest are not free. [d] 730
  But though the picture weary out the eye,
  By nature an unmanageable sight,
  It is not wholly so to him who looks
  In steadiness, who hath among least things
  An under-sense of greatest; sees the parts 735
  As parts, but with a feeling of the whole. 
  This, of all acquisitions, first awaits
  On sundry and most widely different modes
  Of education, nor with least delight
  On that through which I passed.  Attention springs, 740
  And comprehensiveness and memory flow,
  From early converse with the works of God
  Among all regions; chiefly where appear
  Most obviously simplicity and power. 
  Think, how the everlasting streams and woods, 745
  Stretched and still stretching far and wide, exalt
  The roving Indian, on his desert sands: 
  What grandeur not unfelt, what pregnant show
  Of beauty, meets the sun-burnt Arab’s eye: 
  And, as the sea propels, from zone to zone, 750
  Its currents; magnifies its shoals of life
  Beyond all compass; spreads, and sends aloft
  Armies of clouds,—­even so, its powers and aspects
  Shape for mankind, by principles as fixed,
  The views and aspirations of the soul 755
  To majesty.  Like virtue have the forms
  Perennial of the ancient hills; nor less
  The changeful language of their countenances
  Quickens the slumbering mind, and aids the thoughts,
  However multitudinous, to move 760
  With order and relation.  This, if still,
  As hitherto, in freedom I may speak,
  Not violating any just restraint,
  As may be hoped, of real modesty,—­
  This did I feel, in London’s vast