Page:The Excursion, Wordsworth, 1814.djvu/134

108 That scarcely seem to have belonged to me)

If I must take my choice between the pair

That rule alternately the weary hours,

Night is than day more acceptable;—sleep

Doth, in my estimate of good, appear

A better state than waking; death than sleep:

Feelingly sweet is stillness after storm,

Though under covert of the wormy ground!

Yet be it said, in justice to myself,

That in more genial times, when I was free

To explore the destiny of human kind;

Not as an intellectual game pursued

With curious subtilty, thereby to cheat

Irksome sensations; but by love of truth

Urged on, or haply by intense delight

In feeding thought, wherever thought could feed;

I did not rank with those (too dull or nice,

For to my judgment such they then appeared,

Or too aspiring, thankless at the best)

Who, in this frame of human life, perceive

An object whereunto their souls are tied

In discontented wedlock; nor did e'er,