Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak
  A lasting inspiration, sanctified 445
  By reason, blest by faith:  what we have loved,
  Others will love, and we will teach them how;
  Instruct them how the mind of man becomes
  A thousand times more beautiful than the earth
  On which he dwells, above this frame of things 450
  (Which, ’mid all revolution in the hopes
  And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged)
  In beauty exalted, as it is itself
  Of quality and fabric more divine.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTES ON THE TEXT

[Footnote A:  With Robert Jones, in the summer of 1793.—­Ed.]

[Footnote B:  Compare ‘Paradise Lost’, book i. l. 21.—­Ed.]

[Footnote C:  Compare ‘Paradise Lost’, book v. l. 488.—­Ed.]

[Footnote D:  Compare ‘The Sparrow’s Nest’, vol. ii. p. 236.—­Ed.]

[Footnote E:  See ‘Paradise Lost’, book ix. ll. 490, 491.—­Ed.]

[Footnote F:  Mary Hutchinson.  Compare the lines, p. 2, beginning: 

  ‘She was a Phantom of delight.’

Ed.]

[Footnote G:  Compare the preface to ‘The Excursion’.  “Several years ago, when the author retired to his native mountains, with the hope of being enabled to construct a literary work that might live,” etc.—­Ed.]

[Footnote H:  After leaving London, he went to the Isle of Wight and to Salisbury Plain with Calvert; then to Bristol, the Valley of the Wye, and Tintern Abbey, alone on foot; thence to Jones’ residence in North Wales at Plas-yn-llan in Denbighshire; with him to other places in North Wales, thence to Halifax; and with his sister to Kendal, Grasmere, Keswick, Whitehaven, and Penrith.—­Ed.]

[Footnote I:  Raisley Calvert.-Ed.]

[Footnote K:  His friend, dying in January 1795, bequeathed to Wordsworth a legacy of L900.  Compare the sonnet, in vol. iv., beginning

  ‘Calvert! it must not be unheard by them,’

and the ‘Life of Wordsworth’ in this edition.—­Ed.]

[Footnote L:  The Wordsworths went to Alfoxden in the end of July, 1797.  It was in the autumn of that year that, with Coleridge,

  ’Upon smooth Quantock’s airy ridge they roved
  Unchecked, or loitered ‘mid her sylvan combs;’

when the latter chaunted his ‘Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Christabel’, and Wordsworth composed ‘The Idiot Boy’ and ‘The Thorn’.  The plan of a joint publication was sketched out in November 1797. (See the Fenwick note to ‘We are Seven’, vol. i. p. 228.)—­Ed.]

[Footnote M:  The death of his brother John.  Compare the ‘Elegiac Verses’ in memory of him, p. 58.—­Ed.]

* * * * *

FROM THE ITALIAN OF MICHAEL ANGELO

Translated 1805?—­Published 1807