So once it would have been,—­’tis so no more;
  I have submitted to a new control: 
  A power is gone, which nothing can restore; 35
  A deep distress hath humanized my Soul.

  Not for a moment could I now behold
  A smiling sea, and be what I have been: 
  The feeling of my loss will ne’er be old;
  This, which I know, I speak with mind serene. 40

  Then, Beaumont, Friend! who would have been the Friend,
  If he had lived, of Him whom I deplore,
  This work of thine I blame not, but commend;
  This sea in anger, and that dismal shore.

  O ’tis a passionate Work!—­yet wise and well, 45
  Well chosen is the spirit that is here;
  That Hulk which labors in the deadly swell,
  This rueful sky, this pageantry of fear!

  And this huge Castle, standing here sublime,
  I love to see the look with which it braves, 50
  Cased in the unfeeling armor of old time,
  The lightning, the fierce wind, and trampling waves.

  Farewell, farewell the heart that lives alone,
  Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind! 
  Such happiness, wherever it be known, 55
  Is to be pitied:  for ’tis surely blind.

  But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer,
  And frequent sights of what is to be borne! 
  Such sights, or worse, as are before me here.—­
  Not without hope we suffer and we mourn. 60

2.  FOUR SUMMER WEEKS.  In 1794 Wordsworth spent part of a summer vacation at the house of his cousin, Mr. Barker, at Rampside, a village near Peele Castle.

6-7.  Shelley has twice imitated these lines.  Compare:—­

Within the surface of Time’s fleeting river
Its wrinkled Image lies, as then it lay
Immovably unquiet, and for ever
It trembles, but it cannot pass away.
Ode to Liberty, vi.

also the following: 

Within the surface of the fleeting river
The wrinkled image of the city lay,
Immovably unquiet, and for ever
It trembles, but it never fades away.
Evening.

9-10.  The calm was so complete that it did not seem a transient mood of the sea, a passing sleep.

13-16.  Compare with the above original reading of 1807 (restored after 1827) the lines which Wordsworth substituted in 1820 and 1827.

Ah!  THEN, if mine had been the Painter’s hand,
To express what then I saw; and add a gleam,
The lustre, known to neither sea nor land,
But borrowed from the youthful Poet’s dream.

35-36.  A POWER IS GONE—­SOUL.  The reference is to the death at sea of his brother Captain John Wordsworth.  The poet can no longer see things wholly idealized.  His brother’s death has revealed to him, however, the ennobling virtue of grief.  Thus a personal loss is converted into human gain.  Note especially in this connection l. 35 and ll. 53-60.