THIS morning saw I, fled the shower,

The earth reclining in a lull of power:

The heavens, pursuing not their path,

Lay stretched out naked after bath,

Or so it seemed; field, water, tree, were still

Nor was there any purpose on the calm-browed hill

The hill, which sometimes visibly is

Wrought with unresting energies,

Looked idly; from the musing wood,

And every rock, a life renewed

Exhaled like an unconscious thought

When poets, dreaming unperplexed,

Dream that they dream of nought.

Nature one hour appears a thing unsexed,

Or to such serene balance brought

That her twin natures cease their sweet alarms,

And sleep in one another's arms.

The sun with resting pulses seems to brood,

And slacken its command upon my unurged blood.

The river has not any care

Its passionless water to the sea to bear;

The leaves have brown content;

The wall to me has freshness like a scent,

And takes half animate the air,

Making one life with its green moss and stain;

And life with all things seems too perfect blent

For anything of life to be aware.

The very shades on hill, and tree, and plain,

Where they have fallen doze, and where they doze remain.

No Hill can idler be than I ;

No stone its inter-particled vibration

Investeth with a stiller lie;

No heaven with a more urgent rest betrays

The eyes that on it gaze.

We are too near akin that thou shouldst cheat

Me, Nature, with thy fair deceit.

In poets floating lite a water-flower

Upon the bosom of the glassy hour,

In skies that no man sees to move,

Lurk untumultuous vortices of power,

For joy too native, and for agitation

Too instant, too entire for sense thereof,

Motion like gnats when autumn suns are low,

Perpetuai as the prisoned feet of love

On the heart's floors with painèd pace that go.

From stones and poets you ma y know,

Nothing so active is, as that which least seems so.

For he, that conduit running wine of song,

Then to himself does most belong,

When he his mortal house unbars

To the importunate and thronging feet

That round our corporal walls unheeded beat;

Till, all containing, he exalt

His stature to the stars, or stars

Narrow their heaven to his fleshly vault:

When, like a city under ocean,

To human things he grows a désolation,

And is made a habitation

For the fluctuous universe

To lave with unimpeded motion.

He scarcely frets the atmosphère

With breathing, and his body shares

The immobility of rocks;

His heart's a drop-well of tranquillity;

His mind more still is than the limbs of fear,

And yet its unperturbed velocity

The spirit of the simoon mocks.

He round the solemn centre of his soul

Wheels like a dervish, while his being is

Streamed with the set of the world's harmonies,

In the long draft of whatsoever sphere

He lists the sweet and clear

Clangour of his high orbit on to roll,

So gracious is his heavenly grace;

And the bold stars does hear,

Every one in his airy soar,

For evermore

Shout to each other from the peaks of space,

As thwart ravines of azure shouts the mountaineer.