[k] Eager and never weary we pursued Our home-amusements by the warm peat-fire At evening, when with pencil, and smooth slate In square divisions parcelled out and all 510 With crosses and with cyphers scribbled o'er, We schemed and puzzled, head opposed to head In strife too humble to be named in verse: Or round the naked table, snow-white deal, Cherry or maple, sate in close array, 515 And to the combat, Loo or Whist, led on A thick-ribbed army; not, as in the world, Neglected and ungratefully thrown by Even for the very service they had wrought, But husbanded through many a long campaign.

520 Uncouth assemblage was it, where no few Had changed their functions; some, plebeian cards [l] Which Fate, beyond the promise of their birth, [m] Had dignified, and called to represent The persons of departed potentates.

525 Oh, with what echoes on the board they fell! Ironic diamonds,--clubs, hearts, diamonds, spades, A congregation piteously akin! Cheap matter offered they to boyish wit, Those sooty knaves, precipitated down 530 With scoffs and taunts, like Vulcan out of heaven: The paramount ace, a moon in her eclipse, Queens gleaming through their splendour's last decay, And monarchs surly at the wrongs sustained By royal visages.

Meanwhile abroad 535 Incessant rain was falling, or the frost Raged bitterly, with keen and silent tooth; And, interrupting oft that eager game, From under Esthwaite's splitting fields of ice The pent-up air, struggling to free itself, 540 Gave out to meadow grounds and hills a loud Protracted yelling, like the noise of wolves Howling in troops along the Bothnic Main.

[n] Nor, sedulous as I have been to trace How Nature by extrinsic passion first 545 Peopled the mind with forms sublime or fair, And made me love them, may I here omit How other pleasures have been mine, and joys Of subtler origin; how I have felt, Not seldom even in that tempestuous time, 550 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 that fit 555 Our new existence to existing things, And, in our dawn of being, constitute The bond of union between life and joy.
Yes, I remember when the changeful earth, And twice five summers on my mind had stamped 560 The faces of the moving year, even then I held unconscious intercourse with beauty Old as creation, drinking in a pure Organic pleasure from the silver wreaths Of curling mist, or from the level plain 565 Of waters coloured by impending clouds.