Often have I stood 85 Foot-bound uplooking at this lovely tree Beneath a frosty moon.

The hemisphere Of magic fiction, verse of mine perchance May never tread; but scarcely Spenser's self Could have more tranquil visions in his youth, 90 Or could more bright appearances create Of human forms with superhuman powers, Than I beheld loitering on calm clear nights Alone, beneath this fairy work of earth.
On the vague reading of a truant youth [F] 95 'Twere idle to descant.

My inner judgment Not seldom differed from my taste in books.
As if it appertained to another mind, And yet the books which then I valued most Are dearest to me _now_; for, having scanned, 100 Not heedlessly, the laws, and watched the forms Of Nature, in that knowledge I possessed A standard, often usefully applied, Even when unconsciously, to things removed From a familiar sympathy .-- In fine, 105 I was a better judge of thoughts than words, Misled in estimating words, not only By common inexperience of youth, But by the trade in classic niceties, The dangerous craft of culling term and phrase 110 From languages that want the living voice To carry meaning to the natural heart; To tell us what is passion, what is truth, What reason, what simplicity and sense.
Yet may we not entirely overlook 115 The pleasure gathered from the rudiments Of geometric science.

Though advanced In these inquiries, with regret I speak, No farther than the threshold, [G] there I found Both elevation and composed delight: 120 With Indian awe and wonder, ignorance pleased With its own struggles, did I meditate On the relation those abstractions bear To Nature's laws, and by what process led, Those immaterial agents bowed their heads 125 Duly to serve the mind of earth-born man; From star to star, from kindred sphere to sphere, From system on to system without end.
More frequently from the same source I drew A pleasure quiet and profound, a sense 130 Of permanent and universal sway, And paramount belief; there, recognised A type, for finite natures, of the one Supreme Existence, the surpassing life Which--to the boundaries of space and time, 135 Of melancholy space and doleful time, Superior, and incapable of change, Nor touched by welterings of passion--is, And hath the name of, God.

Transcendent peace And silence did await upon these thoughts 140 That were a frequent comfort to my youth.
'Tis told by one whom stormy waters threw, With fellow-sufferers by the shipwreck spared, Upon a desert coast, that having brought To land a single volume, saved by chance, 145 A treatise of Geometry, he wont, Although of food and clothing destitute, And beyond common wretchedness depressed, To part from company and take this book (Then first a self-taught pupil in its truths) 150 To spots remote, and draw his diagrams With a long staff upon the sand, and thus Did oft beguile his sorrow, and almost Forget his feeling: so (if like effect From the same cause produced, 'mid outward things 155 So different, may rightly be compared), So was it then with me, and so will be With Poets ever.