Page:The Prelude, Wordsworth, 1850.djvu/240

218 When up the lonely brooks on rainy days

Angling I went, or trod the trackless hills

By mists bewildered, suddenly mine eyes

Have glanced upon him distant a few steps,

In size a giant, stalking through thick fog,

His sheep like Greenland bears; or, as he stepped

Beyond the boundary line of some hill-shadow,

His form hath flashed upon me, glorified

By the deep radiance of the setting sun:

Or him have I descried in distant sky,

A solitary object and sublime,

Above all height! like an aerial cross

Stationed alone upon a spiry rock

Of the Chartreuse, for worship. Thus was man

Ennobled outwardly before my sight,

And thus my heart was early introduced

To an unconscious love and reverence

Of human nature; hence the human form

To me became an index of delight,

Of grace and honour, power and worthiness.

Meanwhile this creature—spiritual almost

As those of books, but more exalted far;

Far more of an imaginative form

Than the gay Corin of the groves, who lives

For his own fancies, or to dance by the hour,