Page:The Prelude, Wordsworth, 1850.djvu/47

BOOK I.] Oh, with what echoes on the board they fell!

Ironic diamonds,—clubs, hearts, diamonds, spades,

A congregation piteously akin!

Cheap matter offered they to boyish wit,

Those sooty knaves, precipitated down

With scoffs and taunts, like Vulcan out of heaven:

The paramount ace, a moon in her eclipse,

Queens gleaming through their splendour's last decay,

And monarchs surly at the wrongs sustained

By royal visages. Meanwhile abroad

Incessant rain was falling, or the frost

Raged bitterly, with keen and silent tooth;

And, interrupting oft that eager game,

From under Esthwaite's splitting fields of ice

The pent-up air, struggling to free itself,

Gave out to meadow grounds and hills a loud

Protracted yelling, like the noise of wolves

Howling in troops along the Bothnic Main.

Nor, sedulous as I have been to trace

How Nature by extrinsic passion first

Peopled the mind with forms sublime or fair,

And made me love them, may I here omit

How other pleasures have been mine, and joys

Of subtler origin; how I have felt,