Beneath them, summoned to such intercourse : Theirs is the language of the heavens, the power, The thought, the image, and the silent joy: Words are but under-agents in their souls; When they are grasping with their greatest strength, They do not breathe among them: this I speak In gratitude to God, Who feeds our hearts For His own service; knoweth, loveth us, When we are unregarded by the world.
Also, about this time did I receive Convictions still more strong than heretofore, Not only that the inner frame is good, And graciously composed, but that, no less, Nature for all conditions wants not power To consecrate, if we have eyes to see, The outside of her creatures, and to breathe Grandeur upon the very humblest face Of human life. I felt that the array
Of act and circumstance, and visible form,
Is mainly to the pleasure of the mind
What passion makes them; that meanwhile the forms Of Nature have a passion in themselves,
That intermingles with those works of man
To which she summons him; although the works Be mean, have nothing lofty of their own;
And that the Genius of the Poet hence
May boldly take his way among mankind Wherever Nature leads; that he hath stood By Nature's side among the men of old, And so shall stand for ever. Dearest Friend! If thou partake the animating faith That Poets, even as Prophets, each with each Connected in a mighty scheme of truth,
Have each his own peculiar faculty,
Heaven's gift, a sense that fits him to perceive Objects unseen before, thou wilt not blame The humblest of this band who dares to hope That unto him hath also been vouchsafed An insight that in some sort he possesses, A privilege whereby a work of his, Proceeding from a source of untaught things, Creative and enduring, may become
A power like one of Nature's. To a hope Not less ambitious once among the wilds
Of Sarum's Plain,* my youthful spirit was raised; There, as I ranged at will the pastoral downs Trackless and smooth, or paced the bare white roads Lengthening in solitude their dreary line, Time with his retinue of ages fled
Backwards, nor checked his flight until I saw Our dim ancestral Past in vision clear; Saw multitudes of men, and, here and there, A single Briton clothed in wolf-skin vest, With shield and stone-axe, stride across the wold; The voice of spears was heard, the rattling spear Shaken by arms of mighty bone, in strength, Long mouldered, of barbaric majesty.
I called on Darkness-but before the word
Was uttered, midnight darkness seemed to take
All objects from my sight; and lo! again The Desert visible by dismal flames;
It is the sacrificial altar, fed
With living men-how deep the groans! the voice
* In the summer of 1793, on his return from the Isle of Wight, and before proceeding to Bristol and Wales, he wandered with his friend William Calvert over Salisbury plain for three days. See the Life of the Poet in the last volume.-ED.
Of those that crowd the giant wicker thrills The monumental hillocks, and the pomp Is for both worlds, the living and the dead. At other moments-(for through that wide waste Three summer days I roamed) where'er the Plain Was figured o'er with circles, lines, or mounds,* That yet survive, a work, as some divine, Shaped by the Druids, so to represent
Their knowledge of the heavens, and image forth The constellations; gently was I charmed Into a waking dream, a reverie
That, with believing eyes, where'er I turned, Beheld long-bearded teachers, with white wands Uplifted, pointing to the starry sky, Alternately, and plain below, while breath
Of music swayed their motions, and the waste Rejoiced with them and me in those sweet sounds.
This for the past, and things that may be viewed Or fancied in the obscurity of years
From monumental hints: and thou, O Friend ! Pleased with some unpremeditated strains
That served those wanderings to beguile,t hast said That then and there my mind had exercised Upon the vulgar forms of present things,
The actual world of our familiar days,
Yet higher power; had caught from them a tone,
An image, and a character, by books
Not hitherto reflected. Call we this
Compare the reference to "Sarum's naked plain" in the third book of The Excursion.-ED.
+ Descriptive Sketches. This supplies us with the date of the composition of these sketches-viz., the summer of 1793-but he was also at work on this poem while in France in 1791-2.-ED.
Coleridge read Descriptive Sketches when an undergraduate at Cam
A partial judgment—and yet why? for then We were as strangers; and I may not speak Thus wrongfully of verse, however rude, Which on thy young imagination, trained In the great City, broke like light from far. Moreover, each man's Mind is to herself Witness and judge; and I remember well That in life's every-day appearances
I seemed about this time to gain clear sight Of a new world-a world, too, that was fit To be transmitted, and to other eyes Made visible; as ruled by those fixed laws Whence spiritual dignity originates, Which do both give it being and maintain A balance, an ennobling interchange Of action from without and from within; The excellence, pure function, and best power Both of the object seen, and eye that sees.
bridge in 1793-before the two men had met and wrote thus of them : "Seldom, if ever, was the emergence of a great and original poetic genius above the literary horizon more evidently announced.”—ED.
IN one of those excursions (may they ne'er Fade from remembrance!) through the Northern tracts Of Cambria ranging with a youthful friend,* I left Bethgelert's huts at couching-time, And westward took my way, to see the sun Rise, from the top of Snowdon. To the door Of a rude cottage at the mountain's base We came, and roused the shepherd who attends The adventurous stranger's steps, a trusty guide; Then, cheered by short refreshment, sallied forth.
It was a close, warm, breezeless summer night, Wan, dull, and glaring, with a dripping fog Low-hung and thick that covered all the sky; But, undiscouraged, we began to climb
The mountain-side. The mist soon girt us round, And, after ordinary travellers' talk
With our conductor, pensively we sank
Each into commerce with his private thoughts: Thus did we breast the ascent, and by myself Was nothing either seen or heard that checked Those musings or diverted, save that once The shepherd's lurcher, who, among the crags, Had to his joy unearthed a hedgehog, teased His coiled-up prey with barkings turbulent. This small adventure, for even such it seemed In that wild place and at the dead of night,
* With Robert Jones, in the summer and autumn of 1793.-ED.
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