Page:The Prelude, Wordsworth, 1850.djvu/243

BOOK VIII.] Here placed to be the inheritor of heaven,

Will not permit us; but pursue the mind,

That to devotion willingly would rise,

Into the temple and the temple's heart.

Yet deem not, Friend! that human kind with me

Thus early took a place pre-eminent;

Nature herself was, at this unripe time,

But secondary to my own pursuits

And animal activities, and all

Their trivial pleasures; and when these had drooped

And gradually expired, and Nature, prized

For her own sake, became my joy, even then—

And upwards through late youth, until not less

Than two-and-twenty summers had been told—

Was Man in my affections and regards

Subordinate to her, her visible forms

And viewless agencies: a passion, she,

A rapture often, and immediate love

Ever at hand; he, only a delight

Occasional, an accidental grace,

His hour being not yet come. Far less had then

The inferior creatures, beast or bird, attuned

My spirit to that gentleness of love

(Though they had long been carefully observed),