this,
  Although a strong infection of the age,
  Was never much my habit—­giving way
  To a comparison of scene with scene, 115
  Bent overmuch on superficial things,
  Pampering myself with meagre novelties
  Of colour and proportion; to the moods
  Of time and season, to the moral power,
  The affections and the spirit of the place, 120
  Insensible.  Nor only did the love
  Of sitting thus in judgment interrupt
  My deeper feelings, but another cause,
  More subtle and less easily explained,
  That almost seems inherent in the creature, 125
  A twofold frame of body and of mind. 
  I speak in recollection of a time
  When the bodily eye, in every stage of life
  The most despotic of our senses, gained
  Such strength in me as often held my mind 130
  In absolute dominion.  Gladly here,
  Entering upon abstruser argument,
  Could I endeavour to unfold the means
  Which Nature studiously employs to thwart
  This tyranny, summons all the senses each 135
  To counteract the other, and themselves,
  And makes them all, and the objects with which all
  Are conversant, subservient in their turn
  To the great ends of Liberty and Power. 
  But leave we this:  enough that my delights 140
  (Such as they were) were sought insatiably. 
  Vivid the transport, vivid though not profound;
  I roamed from hill to hill, from rock to rock,
  Still craving combinations of new forms,
  New pleasure, wider empire for the sight, 145
  Proud of her own endowments, and rejoiced
  To lay the inner faculties asleep. 
  Amid the turns and counterturns, the strife
  And various trials of our complex being,
  As we grow up, such thraldom of that sense 150
  Seems hard to shun.  And yet I knew a maid, [B]
  A young enthusiast, who escaped these bonds;
  Her eye was not the mistress of her heart;
  Far less did rules prescribed by passive taste,
  Or barren intermeddling subtleties, 155
  Perplex her mind; but, wise as women are
  When genial circumstance hath favoured them,
  She welcomed what was given, and craved no more;
  Whate’er the scene presented to her view,
  That was the best, to that she was attuned 160
  By her benign simplicity of life,
  And through a perfect happiness of soul,
  Whose variegated feelings were in this
  Sisters, that they were each some new delight. 
  Birds in the bower, and lambs in the green field, 165
  Could they have known her, would have loved; methought
  Her very presence such a sweetness breathed,
  That flowers, and trees, and even the silent hills,
  And every thing she looked on, should have had
  An intimation how she bore herself 170
  Towards them and to all creatures.  God delights
  In such a being; for her common thoughts
  Are piety, her life is gratitude.