I found it in a copy of the Poems belonging to the poet's son: I tread the mazes of this argument, and paint How nature by collateral interest And by extrinsic passion peopled first My mind with beauteous objects: may I well Forget what might demand a loftier song, For oft the Eternal Spirit, He that has His Life in unimaginable things, And he who painting what He is in all The visible imagery of all the World Is yet apparent chiefly as the Soul Of our first sympathies--O bounteous power In Childhood, in rememberable days How often did thy love renew for me Those naked feelings which, when thou would'st form A living thing, thou sendest like a breeze Into its infant being! Soul of things How often did thy love renew for me Those hallowed and pure motions of the sense Which seem in their simplicity to own An intellectual charm: That calm delight Which, if I err not, surely must belong To those first-born affinities which fit Our new existence to existing things, And, in our dawn of being, constitute The bond of union betwixt life and joy.
Yes, I remember, when the changeful youth And twice five seasons on my mind had stamped The faces of the moving year, even then A child, I held unconscious intercourse With the eternal beauty, drinking in A pure organic pleasure from the lines Of curling mist, or from the smooth expanse Of waters coloured by the clouds of Heaven.
Ed.] [Footnote p: Snowdrops still grow abundantly in many an orchard and meadow by the road which skirts the western side of Esthwaite Lake .-- Ed.] [Footnote q: Compare the 'Ode, Intimations of Immortality', stanza ix .-- Ed.] * * * * *.