Page:Poems by William Wordsworth (1815) Volume 2.djvu/153

145 I prayed for thee, and that thy end were past;

And willingly have laid thee here at last:

For thou hadst lived, till every thing that cheers

In thee had yielded to the weight of years;

Extreme old age had wasted thee away;

And left thee but a glimmering of the day;

Thy ears were deaf; and feeble were thy knees,—

I saw thee stagger in the summer breeze,

Too weak to stand against its sportive breath,

And ready for the gentlest stroke of death.

It came, and we were glad; yet tears were shed;

Both Man and Woman wept when Thou wert dead;

Not only for a thousand thoughts that were,

Old household thoughts, in which thou hadst thy share;

But for some precious boons vouchsafed to thee,

Found scarcely any where in like degree!

For love, that comes to all; the holy sense,

Best gift of God, in thee was most intense;

A chain of heart, a feeling of the mind,

A tender sympathy, which did thee bind

Not only to us Men, but to thy Kind:

Yea, for thy Fellow-brutes in thee we saw

The soul of Love, Love's intellectual law:—

Hence, if we wept, it was not done in shame;

Our tears from passion and from reason came,

And, therefore, shalt thou be an honoured name!