Page:The Excursion, Wordsworth, 1814.djvu/381

355 These yield, and these to sudden overthrow;

Their virtue, service, happiness, and state

Expire; and Nature's pleasant robe of green,

Humanity's appointed shroud, enwraps

Their monuments and their memory. The vast Frame

Of social nature changes evermore

Her organs and her members, with decay

Restless, and restless generation, powers

And functions dying and produced at need,—

And by this law the mighty Whole subsists:

With an ascent and progress in the main;

Yet oh! how disproportioned to the hopes

And expectations of self-flattering minds!

—The courteous Knight, whose bones are here interred,

Lived in an age conspicuous as our own

For strife and ferment in the minds of men;

Whence alteration, in the forms of things,

Various and vast. A memorable age!

Which did to him assign a pensive lot,

—To linger mid the last of those bright Clouds,

That, on the steady breeze of honour, sailed

In long procession calm and beautiful.

He, who had seen his own bright Order fade,