Poems, selected from the best eds

And I again am strong:
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep,
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong ;
I hear the echoes through the mountains throng,
The winds come to me from the fields of sleep,

And all the earth is gay ;

Land and sea
Give themselves up to jollity,

And with the heart of May
Doth every beast keep holiday ;-

Thou child of joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy

shepherd boy!

Ye blessed creatures, I have heard the call

Ye to each other make ; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,

My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all.

Oh evil day! if I were sullen
While the earth itself is adorning,

This sweet May-morning,
And the children are pulling,

On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,

Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm, And the babe leaps up on his mother's arm;

I hear, I hear, with joy I hear !
But there's a tree, of many, one,

A single field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:

The pansy at my feet

Doth the same tale repeat: Whither is fled the visionary gleam ? Where is it now,

the glory and the dream?

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,

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

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,
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.

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own ; Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind, And, even with something of a mother's mind,

And no unworthy aim,

The homely nurse doth all she can To make her foster-child, her inmate man,

Forget the glories he hath known, And that imperial palace whence he came.

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Poems, selected from the best eds, Volume 1