Until the breath of this corporeal frame,
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul;
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
He then proceeds to describe the passionate fascination which nature exerted over his youth, and the change which had come over him by a deeper and more thoughtful communion with her spirit. When we consider that Wordsworth, at this time, was only twenty-eight, and that even the motions described in the first part of our extract had no existence in contemporary poetry, we can form some idea of his giant leap in advance of his age, as indicated by the unspeakable beauty and novelty of the concluding portion. Our readers will notice that although the style becomes almost transfigured by the intense and brooding imagination which permeates it, the diction is still as simple as prose:
I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract