"So was it when I was a child,
So is it now I am a man,
So may it be when I am old,
Or let me die"—
only that childlike fancy yields place to matured imagination. And if this was so with Wordsworth, whose childhood was so exceptional, still more shall we find it to be true of the average child. The early freshness of the senses may be blunted; the eager curiosity may be satiated; but where the nature remains unspoilt, the sense of wonder and of joy will extend its range and gain in fullness of content.
If we compare Kingsley's development, he was in a way a great "boy" to the end—but a boy with a deepening sense of mystery mellowing his character and his utterances. And thus it was that he could say, looking back on his intercourse with the wonders of nature: "I have long enjoyed them, never I can honestly say alone, because when man was not with me I had companions in every bee and flower and pebble, and never idle, because I could not pass a swamp or a tuft of heather without finding in it a fairy tale of which I could but decipher here and there a line or two, and yet found them more interesting than all the books, save one, which were ever written upon earth."
True, there is another range of experiences to be reckoned with, such as that of Omar Khayyam—
"Yet ah that Spring should vanish with the Rose!
That Youth's sweet-scented manuscript should close!
The Nightingale that on the branches sang,
Ah whence, and whither flown again, who knows?"
Yes, but what might Omar have been with a nobler philosophy of life, and a more wholesome self-restraint. Blasé, toper as he was, how did he begin his Rubáiyat? Thus finely!
"Wake! For the Sun who scatter'd into flight
The stars before him from the Field of Night,
Drives Night along with them from Heav'n and strikes
The Sultan's turret with a Shaft of Light."
There was poetry in the man still—and that, too, of the kind stirred by nature. And from nature likewise comes the pathos of a closing verse—
"Yon rising Moon that looks for us again—
How oft hereafter will she wax and wane;
How oft hereafter rising look for us
Through this same Garden—and for one in vain! "
And if in spite of all that is said, Wordsworth's haunting Ode still asserts its sway, then let there be a still more direct appeal to its author. One of his loveliest sonnets is that which opens—