Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

English Poetry II: From Collins to Fitzgerald.
The Harvard Classics. 1909–14.

William Wordsworth

408. Within King’s College Chapel, Cambridge

TAX not the royal Saint with vain expense,

With ill-match’d aims the Architect who plann’d

(Albeit labouring for a scanty band

Of white-robed Scholars only) this immense

And glorious work of fine intelligence!

—Give all thou canst; high Heaven rejects the lore

Of nicely-calculated less or more:—

So deem’d the man who fashion’d for the sense

These lofty pillars, spread that branching roof

Self-poised, and scoop’d into ten thousand cells

Where light and shade repose, where music dwells

Lingering and wandering on as loth to die—

Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof

That they were born for immortality.