O Wedding-guest! this soul hath been 630
Alone on a wide wide sea:
So lonely 'twas, that God himself
Scarce seemed there to be.

O sweeter than the Marriage-feast,
'Tis sweeter far to me 635
To walk together to the Kirk
With a goodly company.

To walk together to the Kirk
And all together pray,
While each to his great Father bends, 640
Old men, and babes, and loving friends,
And Youths, and Maidens gay.

Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou wedding-guest!
He prayeth well who loveth well, 645
Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best who loveth best,
All things both great and small:
For the dear God, who loveth us,
He made and loveth all. 650

The Marinere, whose eye is bright,
Whose beard with age is hoar,
Is gone; and now the wedding-guest
Turn'd from the bridegroom's door.

[[1048]] He went, like one that hath been stunn'd 655
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man
He rose the morrow morn.

FOOTNOTES:

[1030:1] First published in Lyrical Ballads, 1798, pp. [1]-27; republished in Lyrical Ballads, 1800, vol. i; Lyrical Ballads, 1802, vol. i; Lyrical Ballads, 1805, vol. i; reprinted in The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Appendix, pp. 404-29, London: E. Moxon, Son, and Company, [1870]; reprinted in Lyrical Ballads edition of 1798, edited by Edward Dowden, LL D., 1890, in P. W., 1893, Appendix E, pp. 512-20, and in Lyrical Ballads . . . 1798, edited by Thomas Hutchinson, 1898. The text of the present issue has been collated with that of an early copy of Lyrical Ballads, 1798 (containing Lewti, pp. 63-7), presented by Coleridge to his sister-in-law, Miss Martha Fricker. The lines were not numbered in L. B., 1798.