LINES WRITTEN A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY, ON REVISITING THE BANKS
OF THE WYE DURING A TOUR, July 13, 1798.
Five years have passed; ?ve summers, with the length
Of ?ve long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a sweet inland murmur.[4]--Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
Whi a wild secluded se impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and ect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is e when I again repose
Here, uhis dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which, at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Among the woods and copses lose themselves,
Nor, with their green and simple hue, disturb
The wild green landscape. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms
Green to the very door; and wreathes of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees,
With some uain notice, as might seem,
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some hermits cave, where by his ?re
The hermit sits alone.
Though absent long,
These forms of beauty have not been to me,
As is a landscape to a blind mans eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, a along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:--feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,
As may have had no trivial in?uence
On that best portion of a good mans life;
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed anift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightend:--that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affes gently lead us on,
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame,
And eveion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and bee a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft,
In darkness, and amid the many shapes
Of joyless day-light; when the fretful stir
Unpro?table, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart,
How oft, in spirit, have I turo thee
O sylvahou wahrough the woods,
How often has my spirit turo thee!
And now, with gleams of half-extinguishd thought,
With many reitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope
Though ged, no doubt, from what I was, when ?rst
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded oer the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led; more like a man
Flying from something that he dr