there. 
  When up the lonely brooks on rainy days
  Angling I went, or trod the trackless hills
  By mists bewildered, [X] suddenly mine eyes
  Have glanced upon him distant a few steps, 265
  In size a giant, stalking through thick fog,
  His sheep like Greenland bears; or, as he stepped
  Beyond the boundary line of some hill-shadow,
  His form hath flashed upon me, glorified
  By the deep radiance of the setting sun:  270
  Or him have I descried in distant sky,
  A solitary object and sublime,
  Above all height! like an aerial cross
  Stationed alone upon a spiry rock
  Of the Chartreuse, for worship. [Y] Thus was man 275
  Ennobled outwardly before my sight,
  And thus my heart was early introduced
  To an unconscious love and reverence
  Of human nature; hence the human form
  To me became an index of delight, 280
  Of grace and honour, power and worthiness. 
  Meanwhile this creature—­spiritual almost
  As those of books, but more exalted far;
  Far more of an imaginative form
  Than the gay Corin of the groves, [Z] who lives 285
  For his own fancies, or to dance by the hour,
  In coronal, with Phyllis in the midst—­[Z]
  Was, for the purposes of kind, a man
  With the most common; husband, father; learned,
  Could teach, admonish; suffered with the rest 290
  From vice and folly, wretchedness and fear;
  Of this I little saw, cared less for it,
  But something must have felt. 
                               Call ye these appearances
  Which I beheld of shepherds in my youth,
  This sanctity of Nature given to man, 295
  A shadow, a delusion? ye who pore
  On the dead letter, miss the spirit of things;
  Whose truth is not a motion or a shape
  Instinct with vital functions, but a block
  Or waxen image which yourselves have made, 300
  And ye adore!  But blessed be the God
  Of Nature and of Man that this was so;
  That men before my inexperienced eyes
  Did first present themselves thus purified,
  Removed, and to a distance that was fit:  305
  And so we all of us in some degree
  Are led to knowledge, wheresoever led,
  And howsoever; were it otherwise,
  And we found evil fast as we find good
  In our first years, or think that it is found, 310
  How could the innocent heart bear up and live! 
  But doubly fortunate my lot; not here
  Alone, that something of a better life
  Perhaps was round me than it is the privilege
  Of most to move in, but that first I looked 315
  At Man through objects that were great or fair;
  First communed with him by their help.