Page:The Prelude, Wordsworth, 1850.djvu/64

42 Came from yon fountain?" Thou, my Friend! art one

More deeply read in thy own thoughts; to thee

Science appears but what in truth she is,

Not as our glory and our absolute boast,

But as a succedaneum, and a prop

To our infirmity. No officious slave

Art thou of that false secondary power

By which we multiply distinctions, then

Deem that our puny boundaries are things

That we perceive, and not that we have made.

To thee, unblinded by these formal arts,

The unity of all hath been revealed,

And thou wilt doubt, with me less aptly skilled

Than many are to range the faculties

In scale and order, class the cabinet

Of their sensations, and in voluble phrase

Run through the history and birth of each

As of a single independent thing.

Hard task, vain hope, to analyse the mind,

If each most obvious and particular thought,

Not in a mystical and idle sense,

But in the words of Reason deeply weighed,

Hath no beginning.

Blest the infant Babe,

(For with my best conjecture I would trace