Page:The Excursion, Wordsworth, 1814.djvu/192

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166

With brotherly resemblance. Turn your steps
Wherever fancy leads, by day by night
Are various engines working, not the same
As those by which your soul in youth was moved,
But by the great Artificer endued
With no inferior power. You dwell alone;
You walk, you live, you speculate alone;
Yet doth Remembrance, like a sovereign Prince,
For you a stately gallery maintain
Of gay or tragic pictures. You have seen,
Have acted, suffered, travelled far, observed
With no incurious eye; and books are your's,
Within whose silent chambers treasure lies
Preserved from age to age; more precious far
Than that accumulated store of gold
And orient gems, Which for a day of need
The Sultan hides within ancestral tombs.
These hoards of truth you can unlock at will:
And music waits upon your skilful touch,—
Sounds which the wandering Shepherd from these Heights
Hears, and forgets his purpose;—furnished thus
How can you droop, if willing to be raised?


A piteous lot it were to flee from Man—

Yet not rejoice in Nature. He—whose hours