Page:The Prelude, Wordsworth, 1850.djvu/223

BOOK VII.] A Parliament of Monsters. Tents and Booths

Meanwhile, as if the whole were one vast mill,

Are vomiting, receiving on all sides,

Men, Women, three-years' Children, Babes in arms.

Oh, blank confusion! true epitome

Of what the mighty City is herself,

To thousands upon thousands of her sons,

Living amid the same perpetual whirl

Of trivial objects, melted and reduced

To one identity, by differences

That have no law, no meaning, and no end—

Oppression, under which even highest minds

Must labour, whence the strongest are not free.

But though the picture weary out the eye,

By nature an unmanageable sight,

It is not wholly so to him who looks

In steadiness, who hath among least things

An under-sense of greatest; sees the parts

As parts, but with a feeling of the whole.

This, of all acquisitions, first awaits

On sundry and most widely different modes

Of education, nor with least delight

On that through which I passed. Attention springs,

And comprehensiveness and memory flow,