Page:The Prelude, Wordsworth, 1850.djvu/176

154 These courts of mystery, where a step advanced

Between the portals of the shadowy rocks

Leaves far behind life's treacherous vanities,

For penitential tears and trembling hopes

Exchanged—to equalise in God's pure sight

Monarch and peasant: be the house redeemed

With its unworldly votaries, for the sake

Of conquest over sense, hourly achieved

Through faith and meditative reason, resting

Upon the word of heaven-imparted truth,

Calmly triumphant; and for humbler claim

Of that imaginative impulse sent

From these majestic floods, yon shining cliffs,

The untransmuted shapes of many worlds,

Cerulean ether's pure inhabitants,

These forests unapproachable by death,

That shall endure as long as man endures,

To think, to hope, to worship, and to feel,

To struggle, to be lost within himself

In trepidation, from the blank abyss

To look with bodily eyes, and be consoled."

Not seldom since that moment have I wished

That thou, O Friend! the trouble or the calm

Hadst shared, when, from profane regards apart,

In sympathetic reverence we trod