But husbanded through many a long campaign. 520
  Uncouth assemblage was it, where no few
  Had changed their functions; some, plebeian cards [l]
  Which Fate, beyond the promise of their birth, [m]
  Had dignified, and called to represent
  The persons of departed potentates. 525
  Oh, with what echoes on the board they fell! 
  Ironic diamonds,—­clubs, hearts, diamonds, spades,
  A congregation piteously akin! 
  Cheap matter offered they to boyish wit,
  Those sooty knaves, precipitated down 530
  With scoffs and taunts, like Vulcan out of heaven: 
  The paramount ace, a moon in her eclipse,
  Queens gleaming through their splendour’s last decay,
  And monarchs surly at the wrongs sustained
  By royal visages.  Meanwhile abroad 535
  Incessant rain was falling, or the frost
  Raged bitterly, with keen and silent tooth;
  And, interrupting oft that eager game,
  From under Esthwaite’s splitting fields of ice
  The pent-up air, struggling to free itself, 540
  Gave out to meadow grounds and hills a loud
  Protracted yelling, like the noise of wolves
  Howling in troops along the Bothnic Main. [n]

    Nor, sedulous as I have been to trace
  How Nature by extrinsic passion first 545
  Peopled the mind with forms sublime or fair,
  And made me love them, may I here omit
  How other pleasures have been mine, and joys
  Of subtler origin; how I have felt,
  Not seldom even in that tempestuous time, 550
  Those hallowed and pure motions of the sense
  Which seem, in their simplicity, to own
  An intellectual charm; that calm delight
  Which, if I err not, surely must belong
  To those first-born affinities that fit 555
  Our new existence to existing things,
  And, in our dawn of being, constitute
  The bond of union between life and joy.

    Yes, I remember when the changeful earth,
  And twice five summers on my mind had stamped 560
  The faces of the moving year, even then
  I held unconscious intercourse with beauty
  Old as creation, drinking in a pure
  Organic pleasure from the silver wreaths
  Of curling mist, or from the level plain 565
  Of waters coloured by impending clouds. [o]

    The sands of Westmoreland, the creeks and bays
  Of Cumbria’s rocky limits, they can tell
  How, when the Sea threw off his evening shade,
  And to the shepherd’s hut on distant hills 570
  Sent welcome notice of the rising moon,
  How I have stood, to fancies such as these
  A stranger, linking with the spectacle
  No conscious memory of a kindred sight,