Imatges de pàgina
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Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion,
This pilot is guiding me,

Lured by the love of the genii that move
In the depths of the purple sea;

Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills,
Over the lakes and the plains,

And whether he dream, under mountain or stream,
The Spirit he loves remains;

And I all the while bask in heaven's blue smile,
Whilst he is dissolving in rains.

The sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes,
And his burning plumes outspread,

Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,

When the morning star shines dead.

As on the jag of a mountain crag,

Which an earthquake rocks and swings,

An eagle alit, one moment may sit

In the light of its golden wings;

And when sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath,

Its ardours of rest and of love,

And the crimson pall of eve may fall

From the depth of heaven above,

With wings folded I rest, on mine airy nest,
As still as a brooding dove.

That orbed maiden with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the moon,

Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor,
By the midnight breezes strewn ;

And, wherever the beat of her unseen feet,
Which only the angels hear,

May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof,
The stars peep behind her and peer:

And I laugh to see them whirl and flee,
Like a swarm of golden bees,

When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent,
Till the calm river, lakes, and seas,

Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high,
Are each paved with the moon and these.

I bind the sun's throne with a burning zone,
And the moon's with a girdle of pearl:
The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim,
When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl.

From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape,
Over a torrent sea,

Sunbeam proof, I hang like a roof,

The mountains its columns be.

The triumphal arch, through which I march,
With hurricane, fire, and snow,

When the powers of the air are chained to my chair,
Is the million-coloured bow;

The sphere-fire above, its soft colours wove,
While the moist earth was laughing below.

I am the daughter of the earth and water,
And the nurseling of the sky:

I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die.

For after the rain when, with never a stain,

The pavilion of heaven is bare,

And the winds and sunbeams, with their convex gleams, Build up the blue dome of air—

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,

And out of the caverns of rain,

Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I rise and upbuild it again.

THE SKY-LARK.

Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Higher still and higher

From the earth thou springest

Like a cloud of fire;

The blue deep thou wingest,

And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

In the golden lighting

Of the sunken sun,

O'er which clouds are brightening,

Thou dost float and run;

Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of Heaven,

In the broad day-light,

Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight.

What objects are the fountains

Of thy happy strain?

What fields, or waves, or mountains?

What shapes of sky or plain?

What love of thine own kind? What ignorance of pain?

We look before and after,

And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Yet if we could scorn

Hate, and pride, and fear;

If we were things born

Not to shed a tear,

I know not how thy joy we ever could come near.

Better than all measures

Of delight and sound,
Better than all treasures

That in books are found,

Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground

WORDSWORTH.

THE POET AND HIS POETRY.

[WILLIAM WORDSWORTH is descended from a respectable family; he was born at Cockermouth, on the 7th of April, 1770, and was educated at Hawkeshead School in Lancashire; he removed to the University of Cambridge, in 1787, where he was matriculated a student of St. John's. While a student he made a pedestrian journey through part of France, Savoy, Switzerland, and Italy. On this tour he composed the greater part of those delightful lines subsequently published under the title of "Desciptive Sketches in Verse," being the first of his publications. After Mr. Wordsworth quitted the University, he travelled through various parts of England particularly among mountain and lake scenery, and afterwards visited Germany; but in 1800, he again took up his residence at Grasmere, a small village in Westmoreland, and in 1803, married Miss Mary Hutchinson, the daughter of a merchant at Penrith. Amid these mountains ever dear to him, the poet still resides passing his declining years in solitary musing, or in daily converse with the face of nature.

With regard to Wordsworth as a poet, he may be styled the High Priest of Nature, his temple the universe, and his altar the mountain tops. Here he calls around him all the objects of glory, or grandeur, or sublimity, or beauty, that shadow forth her perfections, and invests his spirit with them as sacerdotal habiliments, embellished with a variety of mystical symbols, wrought out of the rich intellectuality of his mind: and amid mists and darkness, cataracts and swelling floods, the clear grey of the dawn, or the deep gloom of the twilight shadow, does homage and offers up incense from the censor of the heart. Imagination and fancy, his chosen hand-maids, attend him whithersoever he walks, and whisper to him of things pure and perfect in the unseen world, and would seem to teach him that all the objects of sense are representations only of the divine and perfect realities of another world. In his abstract and metaphysical reveries, he dreams that the beautiful creations of his mind, are either dim recollections of a former state purely mental, or that they are the incipient germs of a new and beautiful and perfect existence near at hand. Such is his poetical creed, and he calls upon his disciples to follow him, and he wanders forth reading as he goes, the great volume of nature spread out before him, giving spiritual and mystical interpretations, and solving the solemn utterances of an unknown tongue. He takes for his text the mountain torrent, the fantastic rock, the daisy or the sallow leaf, and each has with him a deep and mysterious meaning, meaning not to be fully comprehended, but by minds which are in degree under the influence of the same spirit which lives in his. Thus Wordsworth is not understood by the generality of readers; they have not learned his creed; they do not understand the language in which he speaks. He is therefore the poet of a class who have a heartfelt love for the objects of sense, and are imbued with that ideal philosophy which refers all to an indwelling existence, which makes the outward what it is. Wordsworth is at last beginning to be popu. lar, and he will continue to gain popularity as mankind begins to think deeply and feel correctly.]

EXTRACTS FROM WORDSWORTH.

NUTTING.

It seems a day,

(I speak of one from many singled out)
One of those heavenly days which cannot die;
When, in the eagerness of boyish hope,

I left our Cottage-threshold, sallying forth
With a huge wallet o'er my shoulder slung,
A nutting-crook in hand, and turned my steps
Towards the distant woods, a Figure quaint,
Tricked out in proud disguise of cast-off weeds
Which, for that service, had been husbanded,
By exhortation of my frugal Dame.

Motley accoutrement, of power to smile

At thorns, and brakes, and brambles,—and, in truth,
More ragged than need was! Among the woods,
And o'er the pathless rocks, I forced my way
Until, at length, I came to one dear nook
Unvisited, where not a broken bough

Drooped with its withered leaves, ungracious sign
Of devastation, but the hazels rose

Tall and erect, with milk-white clusters hung,
A virgin scene!-A little while I stood,
Breathing with such suppression of the heart
As joy delights in; and, with wise restraint
Voluptuous, fearless of a rival, eyed

The banquet, or beneath the trees I sate
Among the flowers, and with the flowers I played
A temper known to those, who, after long
And weary expectation, have been blessed,
With sudden happiness beyond all hope.-
Perhaps it was a bower beneath whose leaves
The violets of five seasons re-appear
And fade, unseen by any human eye;
Where fairy water-breaks do murmur on
For ever, and I saw the sparkling foam,
And with my cheek on one of those green stones
That, fleeced with moss, beneath the shady trees,
Lay round me, scattered like a flock of sheep,
I heard the murmur and the murmuring sound,
In that sweet mood when pleasure loves to pay

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