…The sounding
cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall
rock,
The mountain, and the deep and
gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite: a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, or any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past…
…For I
have learned
To look on nature, not as in the
hour
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing
oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of
ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have
felt
A presence that disturbs me with the
joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense
sublime
Of something far more deeply
interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of
setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living
air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of
man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of
all thought,
And rolls through all things. …
From William Wordsworth, “Lines
written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the Banks of the
Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798. Lyrical
Ballads and other poems (London,
1798).
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