86 INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY.

INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY.
FROM RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD.

Vv.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
‘From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows
He sees it in his joy;
‘The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is. Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended ;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

VI.

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And even with something of a Mother’s mind,
And no unworthy aim,
The homely Nurse doth all she can

To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.

VII.

Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
A six years’ Darling of a pigmy size !
See, where ’mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother’s kisses,
With light upon him from his father’s eyes,
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learned art!

A weding or a festival,

A mourning or a funeral,

And this hath now his heart,
And unto this he frames his song,
Then will he fit his- tongue

To dialogues of business, love, or strife;

But it will not be long

Ere this be thrown aside,

And with new joy and pride
The little Actor cons another part ;
Filling from time to time his “ humorous stage *
With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,
That Life brings with her in her equipage,

; As if his whole vocation

Were endless imitation.