Of fancies fair, and milder hours of youth,
  Hyblean murmurs of poetic thought
  Industrious in its joy, in vales and glens,
  Native or outland, lakes and famous hills! 
  Or on the lonely high-road, when the stars
  Were rising; or by secret mountain-streams,
  The guides and the companions of thy way! 
  Of more than Fancy, of the Social Sense
  Distending wide, and man beloved as man,
  Where France in all her towns lay vibrating
  Like some becalmed bark beneath the burst
  Of Heaven’s immediate thunder, when no cloud
  Is visible, or shadow on the main. 
  For thou wert there, thine own brows garlanded,
  Amid the tremor of a realm aglow,
  Amid a mighty nation jubilant,
  When from the general heart of humankind
  Hope sprang forth like a full-born Deity! 
—­Of that dear Hope afflicted and struck down,
  So summoned homeward, thenceforth calm and sure,
  From the dread watch-tower of man’s absolute self,
  With light unwaning on her eyes, to look
  Far on—­herself a glory to behold. 
  The Angel of the vision!  Then (last strain)
  Of Duty, chosen laws controlling choice,
  Action and joy!—­An Orphic song indeed,
  A song divine of high and passionate thoughts
  To their own music chanted! 
                             O great Bard! 
  Ere yet that last strain dying awed the air,
  With stedfast eye I viewed thee in the choir
  Of ever-enduring men.  The truly great
  Have all one age, and from one visible space
  Shed influence!  They, both in power and act,
  Are permanent, and Time is not with them,
  Save as it worketh for them, they in it. 
  Nor less a sacred roll, than those of old,
  And to be placed, as they, with gradual fame
  Among the archives of mankind, thy work
  Makes audible a linked lay of Truth,
  Of Truth profound a sweet continuous lay,
  Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes! 
  Ah! as I listened with a heart forlorn,
  The pulses of my being beat anew: 
  And even as life returns upon the drowned,
  Life’s joy rekindling roused a throng of pains—­
  Keen pangs of Love, awakening as a babe
  Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart;
  And fears self-willed, that shunned the eye of hope;
  And hope that scarce would know itself from fear;
  Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain,
  And genius given, and knowledge won in vain;
  And all which I had culled in wood-walks wild,
  And all which patient toil had reared, and all,
  Commune with thee had opened out—­but flowers
  Strewed on my corse, and borne upon my bier,
  In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!