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Book XI: Imagination There are in our existence spots of time, Which with distinct pre-eminence retain A vivifying virtue, whence, depressed By false opinion and contentious thought, Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight, In trivial occupations and the round Of ordinary intercourse, our minds Are nourished and invisibly repaired; A virtue by which pleasure is enhanced, That penetrates, enables us to mount When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen. This efficacious spirit chiefly lurks Among those passages of life in which We have had deepest feeling that the mind Is lord and master, and that outward sense Is but the obedient servant of her will. Such moments, worthy of all gratitude, Are scattered everywhere, taking their date From our first childhood; in our childhood even Perhaps are most conspicuous. Life with me, As far as memory can look back, is full Of this beneficent influence. At a time When scarcely (I was then riot six years old) My hand could hold a bridle, with proud hopes I mounted, and we rode towards the hills: We were a pair of horsemen; honest James Was with me, my encourager and guide: We had not travelled long, ere some mischance Disjoined me from my comrade, and, through fear Dismounting, down the rough and stony moor I led my horse, and stumbling on, at length Came to a bottom where in former times A murderer had been hung in iron chains. The gibbet-mast was mouldered down, the bones And iron case were gone; but on the turf Hard by, soon after that fell deed was wrought, Some unknown hand had carved the murderer’s name. The monumental writing was engraven In times long past; and still from year to year, By superstition of the neighbourhood The grass is cleared away, and to this hour The letters are all fresh and visible. Faltering, and ignorant where I was, at length I chanced to espy those characters inscribed On the green sod: Forthwith I left the spot And, reascending the bare common saw A naked pool that lay beneath the hills, The beacon on the summit, and, more near, A girl who bore a pitcher on her head, And seemed with difficult steps to force her way Against the blowing wind. It was, in truth, An ordinary sight; but I should need Colours and words that are unknown to man To paint the visionary dreariness Which, while I looked all round for my lost guide, Did at that time invest the naked pool, The beacon on the lonely eminence, The woman and her garments vexed and tossed By the strong wind. When, in a blessed season With those two dear ones, to my heart so dear, When in the blessed time of early love, Long afterwards I roamed about In daily presence of this very scene, Upon the naked pool and dreary crags, And on the melancholy beacon, fell The spirit of pleasure and youth’s golden gleam; And think ye hot with radiance more divine From these remembrances, and from the power They left behind? So feeling comes in aid Of feeling, and diversity of strength Attends us, if but once we have been strong. Oh, mystery of man, from what a depth Proceed thy honours! I am lost, but see In simple childhood something of the base On which thy greatness stands; but this I feel, That from thyself it is that thou must give, Else never canst receive. The days gone by Come back upon me from the dawn almost Of life; the hiding-places of my power Seem open; I approach, and then they close; I see by glimpses now, when age comes on, May scarcely see at all; and I would give, While yet we may as far as words can give A substance and a life to what I feel: I would enshrine the spirit of the past For future restoration. - Yet another Of these to me affecting incidents, With which we will conclude.
One Christmas-time, The day before the holidays began, Feverish, and tired, and restless, I went forth Into the fields, impatient for the sight Of those two horses which should bear us home; My brothers and myself. There was a crag, An eminence, which from the meeting-point Of two highways ascending, overlooked At least a long half-mile of those two roads, By each of which the expected steeds might come, The choice uncertain. Thither I repaired Up to the highest summit. ’twas a day Stormy, and rough, and wild, and on the grass I sate half-sheltered by a naked wall; Upon my right hand was a single sheep, A whistling hawthorn on my left, and there, With those companions at my side, I watched, Straining my eyes intensely, as the mist Gave intermitting prospect of the wood And plain beneath. Ere I to school returned That dreary time, ere I had been ten days A dweller in my father’s house, he died, And I and my two brothers, orphans then, Followed his body to the grave. The event, With all the sorrow which it brought, appeared A chastisement; and when I called to mind That day so lately past, when from the crag I looked in such anxiety of hope; With trite reflections of morality, Yet in the deepest passion, I bowed low To God who thus corrected my desires; And, afterwards, the wind and sleety rain, And all the business of the elements, The single sheep, and the one blasted tree, And the bleak music of that old stone wall, The noise of wood and water, and the mist Which on the line of each of those two roads Advanced in such indisputable shapes; All these were spectacles and sounds to which I often would repair, and thence would drink, As at a fountain; and I do not doubt That in this later time, when storm and rain Beat on my roof at midnight, or by day When I am in the woods, unknown to me The workings of my spirit thence are brought. (258-389)
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