Such is my hope, the spirit of the Past 285
  For future restoration.—­Yet another
  Of these memorials;—­
                        One Christmas-time, [F]
  On the glad eve of its dear holidays,
  Feverish, and tired, and restless, I went forth
  Into the fields, impatient for the sight 290
  Of those led palfreys that should bear us home;
  My brothers and myself.  There rose a crag,
  That, from the meeting-point of two highways [F]
  Ascending, overlooked them both, far stretched;
  Thither, uncertain on which road to fix 295
  My expectation, thither I repaired,
  Scout-like, and gained the summit; ’twas a day
  Tempestuous, dark, and wild, and on the grass
  I sate half-sheltered by a naked wall;
  Upon my right hand couched a single sheep, 300
  Upon my left a blasted hawthorn stood;
  With those companions at my side, I watched,
  Straining my eyes intensely, as the mist
  Gave intermitting prospect of the copse
  And plain beneath.  Ere we to school returned,—­305
  That dreary time,—­ere we had been ten days
  Sojourners in my father’s house, he died,
  And I and my three brothers, orphans then,
  Followed his body to the grave.  The event,
  With all the sorrow that it brought, appeared 310
  A chastisement; and when I called to mind
  That day so lately past, when from the crag
  I looked in such anxiety of hope;
  With trite reflections of morality,
  Yet in the deepest passion, I bowed low 315
  To God, Who thus corrected my desires;
  And, afterwards, the wind and sleety rain,
  And all the business of the elements,
  The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,
  And the bleak music from that old stone wall, 320
  The noise of wood and water, and the mist
  That on the line of each of those two roads
  Advanced in such indisputable shapes;
  All these were kindred spectacles and sounds
  To which I oft repaired, and thence would drink, 325
  As at a fountain; and on winter nights,
  Down to this very time, when storm and rain
  Beat on my roof, or, haply, at noon-day,
  While in a grove I walk, whose lofty trees,
  Laden with summer’s thickest foliage, rock 330
  In a strong wind, some working of the spirit,
  Some inward agitations thence are brought,
  Whate’er their office, whether to beguile
  Thoughts over busy in the course they took,
  Or animate an hour of vacant ease. 335

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FOOTNOTES ON THE TEXT

[Footnote A:  Compare Shakespeare’s “Stealing and giving odour.”  (’Twelfth Night’, act I. scene i. l. 7.)—­Ed.]