Page:The Prelude, Wordsworth, 1850.djvu/244

222 Won from me those minute obeisances

Of tenderness, which I may number now

With my first blessings. Nevertheless, on these

The light of beauty did not fall in vain,

Or grandeur circumfuse them to no end.

But when that first poetic faculty

Of plain Imagination and severe,

No longer a mute influence of the soul,

Ventured, at some rash Muse's earnest call,

To try her strength among harmonious words;

And to book-notions and the rules of art

Did knowingly conform itself; there came

Among the simple shapes of human life

A wilfulness of fancy and conceit;

And Nature and her objects beautified

These fictions, as in some sort, in their turn,

They burnished her. From touch of this new power

Nothing was safe: the elder-tree that grew

Beside the well-known charnel-house had then

A dismal look: the yew-tree had its ghost,

That took his station there for ornament:

The dignities of plain occurrence then

Were tasteless, and truth's golden mean, a point

Where no sufficient pleasure could be found.