But who shall parcel out His intellect by geometric rules, Split like a province into round and square?
205 Who knows the individual hour in which His habits were first sown, even as a seed?
Who that shall point as with a wand and say "This portion of the river of my mind Came from yon fountain ?" [S] Thou, my Friend! art one 210 More deeply read in thy own thoughts; to thee Science appears but what in truth she is, Not as our glory and our absolute boast, But as a succedaneum, and a prop To our infirmity.

No officious slave 215 Art thou of that false secondary power By which we multiply distinctions; then, Deem that our puny boundaries are things That we perceive, and not that we have made.
To thee, unblinded by these formal arts, 220 The unity of all hath been revealed, And thou wilt doubt, with me less aptly skilled Than many are to range the faculties In scale and order, class the cabinet Of their sensations, and in voluble phrase 225 Run through the history and birth of each As of a single independent thing.
Hard task, vain hope, to analyse the mind, If each most obvious and particular thought, Not in a mystical and idle sense, 230 But in the words of Reason deeply weighed, Hath no beginning.
Blest the infant Babe, (For with my best conjecture I would trace Our Being's earthly progress,) blest the Babe, Nursed in his Mother's arms, who sinks to sleep 235 Rocked on his Mother's breast; who with his soul Drinks in the feelings of his Mother's eye! For him, in one dear Presence, there exists A virtue which irradiates and exalts Objects through widest intercourse of sense.

240 No outcast he, bewildered and depressed: Along his infant veins are interfused The gravitation and the filial bond Of nature that connect him with the world.
Is there a flower, to which he points with hand 245 Too weak to gather it, already love Drawn from love's purest earthly fount for him Hath beautified that flower; already shades Of pity cast from inward tenderness Do fall around him upon aught that bears 250 Unsightly marks of violence or harm.
Emphatically such a Being lives, Frail creature as he is, helpless as frail, An inmate of this active universe.
For feeling has to him imparted power 255 That through the growing faculties of sense Doth like an agent of the one great Mind Create, creator and receiver both, Working but in alliance with the works Which it beholds.

Such, verily, is the first 260 Poetic spirit of our human life, By uniform control of after years, In most, abated or suppressed; in some, Through every change of growth and of decay, Pre-eminent till death.
From early days, 265 Beginning not long after that first time In which, a Babe, by intercourse of touch I held mute dialogues with my Mother's heart, I have endeavoured to display the means Whereby this infant sensibility, 270 Great birthright of our being, was in me Augmented and sustained.

Yet is a path More difficult before me; and I fear That in its broken windings we shall need The chamois' sinews, and the eagle's wing: 275 For now a trouble came into my mind From unknown causes.