Henry Charles Beeching, ed. (1859–1919). Lyra Sacra: A Book of Religious Verse. 1903.
By William Wordsworth (1770–1850)Childhood and Age
| OUR birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; | |
| The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, | |
| Hath had elsewhere its setting, | |
| And cometh from afar: | |
| Not in entire forgetfulness | 5 |
| And not in utter nakedness, | |
| But trailing clouds of glory do we come | |
| From God, who is our home: | |
| Heaven lies about us in our infancy! | |
| Shades of the prison-house begin to close | 10 |
| Upon the growing boy, | |
| But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, | |
| He sees it in his joy; | |
| The youth, who daily farther from the east | |
| Must travel, still is nature’s priest; | 15 |
| And by the vision splendid | |
| Is on his way attended. | |
| At length the man perceives it die away, | |
| And fade into the light of common day. | |
| O joy! that in our embers | 20 |
| Is something that doth live, | |
| That nature yet remembers | |
| What was so fugitive! | |
| The thought of our past years in me doth breed | |
| Perpetual benediction: not indeed | 25 |
| For that which is most worthy to be blest— | |
| Delight and liberty, the simple creed | |
| Of childhood, whether busy or at rest, | |
| With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:— | |
| Not for these I raise | 30 |
| The song of thanks and praise; | |
| But for those obstinate questionings | |
| Of sense and outward things, | |
| Fallings from us, vanishings; | |
| Blank misgivings of a creature | 35 |
| Moving about in worlds not realised, | |
| High instincts before which our mortal nature | |
| Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised: | |
| But for those first affections, | |
| Those shadowy recollections, | 40 |
| Which, be they what they may, | |
| Are yet the fountain light of all our day, | |
| Are yet a master light of all our seeing; | |
| Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make | |
| Our noisy years seem moments in the being | 45 |
| Of the eternal silence: truths that wake, | |
| To perish never; | |
| Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour, | |
| Nor man nor boy, | |
| Nor all that is at enmity with joy, | 50 |
| Can utterly abolish or destroy! | |
| Hence in a season of calm weather, | |
| Though inland far we be, | |
| Our souls have sight of that immortal sea | |
| Which brought us hither, | 55 |
| Can in a moment travel thither, | |
| And see the children sport upon the shore, | |
| And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. | |