And doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder—everlastingly.
Dear child! dear girl! that walkest with me here,
If thou appear’st untouched by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine:
Thou liest in Abraham’s bosom all the year;
And worship’st at the temple’s inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not.
It is, however, in the sublime “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from the Recollections of Childhood,” that we best perceive the power of Wordsworth’s imagination in all the various modes of its expression—descriptive, analytic, meditative, interpretative, abstract and ecstatic; and in this ode each of these modes helps the other; the grand choral harmonies of the rapturous upward movement seeming to be born out of the intense contemplation, that hovers dizzily over the outmost bounds of human conception, to scrutinize, in the dim dawn of consciousness,
—those first affections,