For this, for every thing, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan, suckled in a creed outworn,
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
THE PRE-EXISTENCE OF THE SOUL.
[From Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.]
Our birth is but a sleep, and a forgetting: